Many situations lend themselves to using a popup window, where a smaller version of the browser window opens up on top of the main browser window.

However, recent web browsers go to great lengths to prevent popup windows from appearing, which is great for stopping intrusive popup advertising, but not much good when a website has a legitimate reason for displaying something in a popup window.

All major web browsers now require several clicks (and often a page reload) to allow a popup window for a particular website, so the easiest approach is to find an alternative method of presenting that information.

If you must use a popup, provide graphical instructions to your visitor on how to accept the popup window — ideally, detect the browser your visitor is using, and show instructions specific to that browser. (It’s not that hard to cover the main web browsers in use today: Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.)

It is important to consider early on a strategy for what format your company’s staff email addresses will take. Your final decision will depend on the number of employees and how you expect this to grow throughout the life of your business.

• If you do not plan to employ more than 5 staff, it is acceptable to have firstname-only email addresses, such as david@example.com. The chance of having two identical first names is relatively low, and with the size of the business, you can append an initial if needed.
• For 5-20 staff, you might choose a firstname/surname initial format, such as davidj@example.com, or use the full firstname/surname approach, such as davidjohnson@example.com or david.johnson@example.com.
• For 20-200 staff, always prefer davidjohnson@example.com or david.johnson@example.com.
• For more than 200 staff, consider dividing email addresses across departments, such as david.johnson@hr.example.com.

For smaller staff numbers, also consider the benefits of creating email aliases for misspellings of staff names, and shortcut names using people’s initials for internal use (e.g. dtj@example.com).

Beyond staff email addresses, you should also get into the habit of utilising department-specific email addresses (which can simply forward to the relevant person(s) in the company.) Examples include accounts@, sales@, support@, hr@, complaints@, privacy@ and jobs@. This way, you can easily delegate work from one staff member to another by simply changing the recipient of the forwarder. This is beneficial both to smaller businesses, which share the load among few staff, and larger businesses, which need continuity over staff transition.

These tips are used by web design professionals to bring out the best in photos when adding them to a website. You will need a photo editing tool (such as Adobe Photoshop, Jasc PaintShop Pro, or, depending on your computer, you might have sufficient software already installed.)

• First, check the photo has accurate colour. If the camera did not have an appropriate white balance for the type of lighting, the colours will be off, and you will need to manually adjust the hue of each colour to correct the photo.
• Next, determine the composition of the photo, and what your subject matter is supposed to be. As you will be reducing the dimensions of the photo from its original, you might need to crop the image in order to retain focus on the subject or simplify the composition to suit the smaller size.
• If the camera did not over-saturate the photo (as many digital cameras do by default these days,) consider slightly saturing the image. On the screen, due to it being back-lit, photos appear to come to life with a little more saturation. (On paper, a neutral colour tone looks better.)
• Consider what you are trying to portray with the photo, and adjust the red/yellow tones to make the image warmer, if desired, or the green/blue tones to make the image cooler or fresher, if that is what the message is intended to be.
• When you resize a photo, it will be blurred slightly to compensate for the missing pixels. If the photo is small, you will obtain more definition by sharpening the photo slightly after you have resized it.

A “splash page”, also called an intro page, is a web page that displays some form of introduction or Flash animation that a visitor must click (or wait) in order to proceed to your actual website.

If you expect people to do business with you, don’t waste their time — and there exists not a more flagrant demonstration of pointlessness than demanding your visitors click a button before they can enter your website.

If you want proof, check the abandonment rate in your website statistics package of your beautiful splash page. If it is any number higher than 0%, you’ve needlessly lost potential customers.

If you use Google Analytics to track visitor statistics on your website, you can instruct it to ignore traffic coming from your own computer (or network of computers.) This is important to ensure the accuracy of your statistical data; otherwise, your visitor numbers will be inflated by the times you or your staff access your own website.

To do this in Google Analytics, login to your account, then, under Analytics Settings, go to Filter Manager, and click Add Filter. Give it a name, such as “Exclude me”; from Filter Type, choose “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”; then enter your IP address in the next box. (If you don’t know your IP address, use this What Is My IP Address? tool.) Next, choose the profile(s) on the left hand side and click Add. Finally, click Finish to apply the filter.