If you use a program like HomeSite or MS FrontPage, I strongly urge you to make use of the Templates features available in those programs. Some would argue that this is even more important than Consistent Design - usually if they are on a slower Internet connection. Regardless of the speed that you use to connect to the Net, though, nobody wants to wait forever for your page to load. A few things you can do to help speed your page loading include using less graphics, using smaller graphics, using GIF files in place of larger JPG files if you don't need more than 256 colors, and shrinking your GIF files with utilities like GifWizard . Even if you don't use Style Sheets, do make use of the Height and Width tags for your graphics.
Many people are familiar with .htaccess files in relation to password protecting directories.
In reality, it is a very powerful tool to customize your web site without a lot of programming or hassle. We've all seen them, all experienced them - the dreaded error pages. What you may not have realized is that you can customize these error pages for your web site, either to give more usefull information or just make them look more friendly. The easiest, and most recognizable, example of this is the 404 Error - File Not Found. This file, which has our company logo on it, a friendly message about the error and the webmaster email address, is much more pleasing to the eye than the default error message.