I have a friend who wants to set up a Web site where he and a couple of other people can post articles. The easy way out is to just set up a blog for them, but I don't really like the blog metaphor for their site.

In a conversation today, I referred to Mark Pilgrim's excellent 30 Days to a More Accessible Web Site.

There are commercial utilities that will optimize your HTML and your images, cutting the size down so your stuff loads faster and you save bandwidth. But I like free.

Steve DeLassus asked me for some tips on design for a site he's building. Since that's fairly general-interest information, I figure I might as well make a post of it.

Gatermann told me about a piece of freeware he found on one of my favorite sites, tinyapps.org, called JPG Cleaner. It strips out the thumbnails and other metadata that editing programs and digital cameras put in your graphics that isn't necessary for your Web browser to render them. Sometimes it saves you 20K, and sometimes it saves you 16 bytes. Still, it's worth doing, because more often than not it saves you something halfway significant.

There are few challenges more daunting than designing a truly first-rate Web site.

I'm curious what this looks like. I'm using a template from glish.com, heavily modified by yours truly. It's not quite the design I originally envisioned but I think it's close enough. It's dark. It's readable. It's a little edgy. It's me.