Avoid Under Construction signs - All good web sites should always be under construction. Including words "under construction", or worse yet a blinking animation, only makes you look like an amateur. These notices are so frowned upon that directories such as Yahoo will not accept sites with one on home page. Most awards programs will immediately reject any sites displaying this dishonorable phrase.

Don't use a hundred different fonts on same page - You can run into all kinds of problems when you use fonts on internet. There are incompatibilities between operating systems (Unix, Mac and Windows all work differently) and browsers. Fonts have to be installed locally by your visitor - if he doesn't have it installed your page may look funny to him.

If you mix many different fonts on your page you are almost immediately known as an amateur. A font or two is fine, but work to avoid "ransom note" effect.

Don't write your HTML to a particular browser - Browsers change very quickly. The one that is popular today may be almost unused in a few months. So don't spend any time trying to fit your HTML to Internet Explorer or Netscape or Opera. Just make good HTML and then let browser do it's job.

Use style sheets - Style sheets (known as CSS) is a way to gain incredible control over how items are displayed on your pages. Better still, you can create one style sheet document and reference it from all over your web. This way, if you want to change, say, your text color from green to blue, you only have to change one file. Every reference to style will automatically and immediately get changed.

Include Meta Tags - Meta tags are used to tell outside world, especially search engines, all about your pages. You should include appropriate meta tags on each and every page. These tags need to give a description, copyright notice, author name, language and search keywords. In addition, it is a good idea to include RSAC rating for content filters.

Include a descriptive title - Be sure and write a short, keyword heavy, very descriptive title for each page. Search engines rely on these titles in determining how to index your site. Be sure your title is accurate and honest as well.

Avoid lots of moving things - An occasional animation is great and can turn a boring page into an award winner, but don't go overboard. In general, more than one animation per page is excessive.

Cool. What you want is animated GIFs. A GIF is an image format which supports extremely good compression and looks very clear and sharp. In 1989, a standards committee added ability to include multiple frames (images) within a single GIF file. This standard became known as GIF89a. It's incredibly powerful as you can create some awesome effects without learning curve associated with Java or Dynamic HTML. In addition, virtually all browsers support GIFs in all forms, while Java and Dynamic HTML support is sometimes lacking or turned of by user (animation can also be turned off by user, but at least unanimated version shows up in that case).

A good product to get if you want to do animation in this manner is Ulead's GIF Animator. Another excellent animation tool is Animation Shop from Jasc (the same folks who sell Paint Shop Pro). These products are both inexpensive and easy to use.