4. Pretend you are a visitor to your site and click on all your links to make sure they work properly. Or ask a friend or family member to do it for you; problems will be more obvious to them.

5. Finally, view your pages in your browser with pictures turned off before you upload files to your server (that's usually whoever is providing your Internet access). Are pages still readable? Obviously they won't look as good without your background texture and your graphics and photographs, but are they still acceptable? If you're not too confident of your own judgement, ask somebody else.

4. Preferably use same background texture/colour on all your pages as it gives a more unified feel and appearance to your site. However, if your chosen colours clash badly with, say, colours in an important graphic or photo on one particular page, by all means change background for that one page.

5. If you change link colours from their default settings (for instance, green and blue of Internet Explorer and green and purple of Netscape Navigator) because they clash with your chosen colour scheme, then keep these link colours consistent throughout your site or visitors will have trouble working out which links they have been to and which they haven't. If you've used colour to enliven your text in other places, they may even have trouble working out what's a link and what isn't.

6. Don't specify same colour for visited links as for unvisited ones: this will confuse visitors just as much as using different link colours on each page.