Whether it's your company web site's news page, blog posts, mailings or Twitter, there are some basics that even I know. I break these rules all the time, but I am not a company trying for a particular effect, I'm just alive and online. Sometimes, people have asked advice on these things, and usually they don't listen.

1. Use lots of lists of tips with titles that begin "10 things". How can this still work? I'm pretty sick of seeing these, but I guess there are new suckers punters born every day. You came here and you are reading this, right? I have zero authority in this area, so I guess the theory about "10 things" is true.

2. All kidding aside, please study titles and make one that doesn't put people to sleep. Companies love to have long headlines with too many adjectives and superlatives. You want good SEO and people reading? Say "Arhtur Frobisher Innocent" rather than "Fifth District Superior Court Aquits Arthur Frobisher in Long Trial". Better yet,  "Frobisher Aquitted". If they don't get the Frobisher reference, they don't care anyway.

3. No one really reads web pages except search robots and spiders. You care about them because you want good listings. Humans scan the pages, they rarely read them. (see 4 and 5 below)

4. Forget positioning in search, go for pertinence. I just did a search on Tropo cloud voip on Google, Bing and Yahoo. If you wanted to find the guest spot tropo did on our voip conference that would be a reasonable search, and the answer you want comes up early not because of positioning but because of pertinence.

5. When humans scan pages, it is said that the first 12 characters of the title will retain the attention. If the very first part of the title isn't compelling, most people move on, according to (I think) Jakob Nielson.

6. Don't make people register to read your stuff. If it's a white paper and it's seriously worth reading, maybe have it mailed to them. If it's on the web as pages or a webinar or slides, most people are loathe to register. Unless I know there's gold at the end of the trail, I'm out of there if registration is required. Make your stuff embedable, someone was kind enough to teach me this not all that long ago. (thanks, Ryan)

7. Look to your skies for a warning. Has anyone figured out yet why I keep saying this and what movie it comes from? Good! Now, look at Chris Brogan and a dozen other very high visibility bloggers. Chris gives away more good info in a single post than most people have in their registration required stuff.  People like Chris and Seth Godin and Louis Gray must be getting something out of all the good information they put out there, so look at how they operate. "Cop and Blow" is the musician's term for this. That's what creative people do, study what came before.

8. Make the links and indeed your domain name refelct what the article is about. In Wordpress it's just a setting that change links so they have words in them. WP lets you make this anything you like. It chooses the title words by default. Consider building your own short URL service that lets you do anything you like. Here are a few examples:

To when the next VUC session is, http://vuc.me/next
To join the IRC channel on the web: http://vuc.me/irc
VUC mailing list? http://vuc.me/mailinglist

9. Hmmm, still need two more for my "10 best" list. Ok, here's one: Ajax is wonderful and even Flash can do good, not just evil. You need to think of the users, not yourself when you are building a site or writing an article. Another great Nielksen comment is that people spend 99% of their surfing time on other people's sites, not yours.

Flash: consider if it might irritate the audience to start music playing on each visit. Do not make menu items move around, no one likes this. No one. Most Flash programmers' portfolio sites do this though. Be careful about screen size, yes, most people now have 1280 or more screen rez, but a lot of people still use 1024 with large text. Too many Flash sites have invisible navigation because they are too big. Flash designers as a whole, are creative in everything except trying to put themselves in the place of someone looking at their stuff.

Ajax: don't break the main conventions of the web, such as hitting enter to submit (unless there's a reason for it, and sometimes there is) and using tabs to navigate fields. Just because Ajax is hipper than MSIE doesn't mean you can ignore important standards, ways people expect to use your site.

10. Ok, you've almost gotten through ten whole concepts that many people I know are having a lot of trouble digesting, not counting the Flash programmers. Here's one last thing to think about. Content is king. It can't be said enough. The bloggers I mentioned know this, they have made it an art to stuff every single post with tons of good info.

Did you learn one thing from the above? I continue to see the same mistakes in Flash sites, the same bad corporate blog titles, the same watered down content, the same mistakes made in spite of the fact that these things have been pounded to the ground for years.