By now, you probably either have a homepage, are looking to make a homepage, or are looking to make your page better. So, here's a small area where you can get tips, hints, and ideas to make your page one worthy of checking out.

Truthfully (and sadly), a great deal of personal homepages suck. Why? Mostly because people just don't know what to be done, or they follow the same pattern as everyone else, creating an electronic cliche. What can be done to make them better? Here's a small list of things that can greatly influence a page:

• Large Images - Try to keep the images to a minimum. Since not everyone is lucky enough to have a cable modem, there are those of us who still have to download stuff and, most likely, we'll hit the stop button, rather than download too many big images.
  
• Information - Actually put some content in your pages. If you have a page that only has two links to other sites, you may as well not have a page. If you make a page, try to put something interesting and vreative in it, so visitors will actually stick around to see what you have to say.
  
• Pre-designed Graphics - Anyone who uses the rainbow divider on a homepage deserves to be shot. Not only is it probably the most over-used graphic ever, it screams "I have no talent! Kill me before I reproduce!". If you can't make your own graphics, then at least find something new and original. Don't subject us to another batch of the same graphics we've seen all over. And yes, those stupid rotating graphics suck, too.
  
• Homepage Generators - Yes, they make it easier to do what you want to be done with a page, but all they do is let the world know that you didn't take the few minutes needed to learn some simple HTML. All the good web designers write their own code. (80% of them use Netscape as well. At the nationals, there was only about one or two people who used explorer).
  
• Blinking text - If you use blinking text for entire paragraphs, shooting is too good for you. You need to die in a vat of corrosive acid. Slowly and painfully. Never use the blink tag unless you absolutely have to, and never for more than a few words or a title.
  
• Layout - This is a little more advanced, but still very important. If all the information is in a big, long paragraph, it will be very hard to find anything, as well as annoying to load. Split up the work into separate pages.
  
• Under Construction - We all know the homepages are all under construction. Spare us having to download another graphic.