It's very easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles but the content of the page is more important, and you don't want to loose your audience just because they can't see your latest trick. But if you don't want a page full of plain and simple text you can still jazz it up a bit, just think understated...

My favourite trick is one of the simplest things around, a nice title, you know, those sexy little squares with writing on them. Many people do this effect with a simple picture, just get your digital paintbrush out and before you know it you've got a wonderful .gif file that you just include in your web page. Unfortunately even GIFs use a fair few bits and there are quite a few people who don't actually look at pictures on the Internet. This means they end up with a nice file of a couple of kb for you to load when you look at their page and code that looks like...
<IMAGE="my_title_picture.gif" alt="The Title">
at the very best, more likely you'll find a couple of extra treats in there like height and/or width. The silly thing is that they could do exactly the same, (sometimes more,) with a lot less fuss.

A title of the simplest kind!

It's really not hard, that must have taken me at least 15 seconds. The code is more concise than before, and without a picture to download it's so much quicker. I know some people get a kick from watching a picture slowly download but myself, I don't. The thing is it's not just efficient because it's quicker for us all, it works better too. This is readable directly by sight aids for the visually impaired, their computer will happily enlarge it to whatever is needed, it may even read it out to them, but it won't have to keep hunting for an alternative piece of code just so it can tell someone the title of a page. This code will work if your monitor is 14" or 21" just resize your browser to try, it really is that efficient.

You can do so many simple tricks on a web page without cutting off your audience. It's no problem to have a help section that you can spot just by hovering your mouse over, or an image map that people who can't see images on can still use. One of the most effective is to simply colour code your links, it's incredibly simple to do and it creates a good feel on a page, users like to know that if they click the red link they'll go to pages about people and green links will take them to pages about places. Such little tricks make navigating web sites much more intuitive and means people are more likely to keep coming back and telling their friends.