I don’t usually blog about websites. It’s what I do for a living, and lord knows, it’s enough to do it eight hours a day, without going on about it here. But, there are a couple things that are so dumb, that they just s@*T me. Here they are…

1. Do not use images in place of text. If you do then search engines will not be able to index the information on your page. A good example of this is the Black Clock magazine site. Nice magazine, lousy site. You could google for a month and never find it, so what’s the use?

2. Provide information people expect. If you are an author and you are putting up a web page add a “News” section. In a fit of foolhardiness, actually call it “News”. It will be something easy for interested folk to check and update. If you are feeling absolutely giddy, you could even see if you could syndicate the news page with an RSS feed or some such. Who knows, it could actually work for you.

3. Keep images to a minimum. Images are cool, but the world is not on a broadband connection yet. It’s just dumb to pointlessly pack a page with images. For examples, see here.

Oh, and I doubt anyone from the SFWA ever reads this site, but here’s an idea. Get all of your members to set up RSS feeds for their news, set up a news page on your site, and automatically you get to be one of the major SF news sites in the world. Seems obvious, no?