Top of the Tips
The most important tip for even veteran authors is to surf the Web yourself. We can show and explain a few neat tricks to get you started, but hundreds of thousands of authors out there are combining and recombining HTML and XHTML tags and juggling content to create compelling and useful documents.
All the popular browsers provide a way to view the source for the web pages that you download. Examine (don’t steal) them for how they create the eye-catching and effective features, and use them to guide your own creations. Get a feel for the more effective web collections. How are their documents organized? How large is each document?
We all learn from experience, so go get it!
Design for Your Audience
We repeatedly argue throughout this book that content matters most, not look. But that doesn’t mean presentation doesn’t matter.
Effective documents match your target audience’s expectations, giving them a familiar environment in which to explore and gather information. Serious academicians, for instance, expect a journal-like appearance for a treatise on the physiology of the kumquat: long on meaningful words, figures, and diagrams and short on frivolous trappings like cute bullets and font abuse. Don’t insult the reader’s eye, except when exercising artistic license to jar or to attack your reader’s sensibilities. By anticipating your audience and designing your documents to appeal to their tastes, you also subtly deflect unwanted surfers from your pages.
For instance, ...
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