1. Absolutely, under no circumstances, use Microsoft Silverlight for anything on your website. Nobody uses it, and nobody has it installed. Just use Flash.
2. Don’t be afraid of using white text on a black background, but make sure you make the extra effort to make it readable. Make the text slightly off-white instead of a pure white, and make the background slightly off-black. Increase the leading past what you’d use normally. And above all else, try and read it yourself. If you can’t read it, nobody else will.
3. Test your website in as many browsers as you can, but make sure you test it in the main browsers; IE6, IE7, Firefox, Opera and Safari. If you’re a Mac user, don’t use that as an excuse for not testing it on a PC. Websites can look radically different between the two – especially text sizes.
4. SEO is good to make your website more visible in the search engines, but don’t go so far as to optimise your website for the search engines more than your users. Don’t load your title tags with keywords – make them useful to your users.
5. Don’t focus all your attention on your homepage, because most people will never see it. Users usually find your website through the search engines, so make sure all your interior pages are just as easy to use as your homepage.
6. Also, make your homepage easy to use. If people are lost on your website, they’ll do one of two things: They’ll click the home button if they can find it, or they’ll leave. Make sure that if they decide to visit your homepage they don’t feel lost anymore.
7. Keep content short and to the point.
8. If your page looks like it has lots of content on it, people won’t read it. Make your content look easy to read.
9. Look at bbc.co.uk. This is an example of a good website.
10. Make your content useful to your users. If it isn’t useful, don’t have it on your website.

From my first ever phone (the Motorola vBox) to 2 weeks ago, I’ve always hated my mobile phone. I’ve tried to love them, and I’ve had some mobile phones in the past that I should have loved. The P900 was pretty special, and it was chocked full of a thousand different applications. This was a PDA masquerading as a mobile phone, but after a while I got sick of its stupid interface and I just wanted a phone again. This experience has characterised my entire mobile phone-using history. Buy fancy phone, get sick of awkward interface, and buy a smaller and less complicated mobile phone.

Fast forward to now, and I’ve just got sick of the P1i (ridiculously complicated interface), and I was on the market for a new mobile phone. Instead of following my usual pattern of buying a simplistic phone after a disappointing phone, I bought the iPhone.

As regular readers will know, I’ve resisted the temptation of an iPhone for a while, instead opting for its little brother; the iPod Touch. I’d had the Touch for about six months, and when I realised that I still loved that gorgeously simple interface six months later, I knew I was onto something unusually special, and I knew I had to buy an iPhone.

So, let’s get the bad bits of the iPhone out of the way first – the texting takes some getting used to, you can’t put it in your pocket with anything else for fear of damaging it, you have to use iPod headphones unless you have an adapter, and the speaker when talking to people sounds a bit crackly when it’s turned up loud. Other than that, every else is perfect.

And I genuinely mean that. Whilst much of the iPhone’s interface won’t wow you, everything is just built to make your life easier. Text messages are organised by recipient instead of message, and messages are show as conversations in little speech bubbles, showing your replies and their replies. If you’re doing something on your phone and a text comes in, the text will appear in full over the top of whatever you are doing, giving you an option to either reply or ignore. Setting an alarm is as easy as turning a wheel, because you literally turn a wheel to set it. Everything on the iPhone is laid out in such a way so that you never have to think about how you need to do what you want to do.

And then there’s the amazing extras it manages to shove in there too. The music player is just the iPod Touch stuck into the iPhone, so that’s nigh-on perfect. Usually when you hear the words mobile phone application you’ll immediately think of a slightly cut down version of the bigger application that doesn’t work as well, but here there is a fully-fledged iPod.

Next on the list is the utterly amazing Safari browser, which is by far the best portable internet browser I have ever used. What makes it so good is the fact that pages are rendered as they would be using the desktop version of Safari, apart from they’re zoomed out to fit the iPhone’s screen. You can then double tap any area to zoom in, or use the fancy pinch feature. The best thing about zooming in is all the text is smoothed, so no matter how close you zoom in the text looks just as good as it would zoomed right out.

But forget all of the iPhone’s fancy features for a second. The only thing that really matters is this: the iPhone is a joy to use no matter what you are doing with it. Sending a text message becomes a screen filled with colourful bubbles. Viewing photos becomes a game of sliding your finger around the screen, and pinching it to zoom in. If you were to buy one right now, I can personally guarantee that you wouldn’t be disappointed. That’s how good the iPhone is.

The iPhone is so much more than just a mobile phone, and it almost feels a crime to call it that. You’ll never look at a mobile the same way again.

Betcha.

A final note
Before you start thinking I’m an Apple fanboy and I’m just praising the product because I love Apple, then let me tell you this: I’m extremely difficult to please when it comes to interfaces on anything, especially mobile phones. This is the first and only mobile phone that I have actually found a pleasure to use.

I’m selling one of these.

If you want to buy it, you know how to get in touch. It’s going for a good price.

This is useful. And a very good idea.