Mind Your Manners

• Respect your visitors' time: don't have an excess of extremely short or "coming soon" pages.
• Make the site easy to navigate. Give pages and links clear names, and avoid adding a lot of extra clutter.
• Remember that most visitors won't look too hard to find something, so try to have most content no more than two clicks away from the main page.
• This one's a no-brainer: don't steal from other sites. Don't direct-link to their images, and do not steal their content and pass it off as your own work.
• If you want to use something from another site, get permission first. At the very least give the source credit and link to them, but only use that for something - like a celebrity photograph - that's not unique to their site.
• If you ask another site to link to you, for heaven's sake, link to their site from yours before asking.

Bring on the Traffic

• To attract visitors to your site, submit it - using the no charge option - for listing in the appropriate categories in directories such as Yahoo and dmoz. In my opinion, relatively little traffic is gained by listing your site in cliques and fanlistings.
• Place a link to your main index - or home page - on each page of your site. Then if people find a non-main page from a search engine (which will happen more often the longer your site remains open) they can still find your main page.
• If you move your site, leave the new URL on every page of your old site. (Granted, that won't be possible if the previous site is no longer available.)

Make your own life easier

• Always back up your files. This is one that I learned the hard way.
• It's often convenient to have your email listed only on a "Contact" page; if you ever change your email address, you only have to change it one time - on the contact page.
• It's sometimes helpful to name your graphics to match the page they're used on, such as "main1.jpg", "main2.jpg" to go with your "main.html" page. Then they'll appear together in your file list and you'll know what goes where.
• Be aware that from time to time, small-minded people will say bad things about your site. You really can't please all of the people all of the time, so try not to let that get you down.
• If you don't feel like updating your website, don't update. Websites are supposed to be fun; they shouldn't stress you out.

Site Names

These are a few names that I thought would be good for an Alias site. If you'd like to use one, let me know and I'll take it off of the list.

Dark Places
Double Trouble
Family Secrets
Friend or Foe?
Gallery of Lies
Hidden Hearts
Just Business
Lyin' Eyes
Q&A
Security Section
Spies R Us
The Conversation Room
Who Are You?