Here are some guidelines for creating a popular site:

Provide thumbnails
Provide thumbnails - users don't often like sitting around for five minutes while a wonderful picture of the view from your window appears. Give them a small picture they can click on if they actually want to see the larger image. However, making a smaller image means going into an image editor and making it smaller, not just defining the height and width of an image in HTML.

Provide a way of turning off music
Some of the people visiting your pages may not like your music, even if you love it. Give them some way of turning it off if they don't like it.

Use the <noframes> tag
By simply using a <noframes> tag in a frameset means that all of those viewers who don't have frames a way of viewing your site in all it's glory. You can put 'Sorry, you can't view this site' in your noframes area, but it would be far better to give a link to a no frames version.

Use ALT attributes on images
Again, for all those with Lynx or similar non-graphical browsers. Believe me - I've used Lynx previously and if you don't have an ALT alternative text attribute, browsing is made very hard!

Give some navigation system
You must have noticed that there's a navigation bar at the side of nearly every page on this site. Provide some way or another to get to other pages on as many pages as you can. It saves using the back and forward buttons! This feature is essential for a sucessful site.

Give your pages a similar feel
Make sure your whole site has a similar 'feel' to it. It makes the whole site look and feel much nicer if all the pages generally look like they are all part of one site.

Design for all resolutions
I have used a 640x480 screen previously, and some of mirrormere.com's users do as well. It is simply no good designing your site for just your resolution - make sure your creation can be seen in all resolutions with all it's glory, without those horrendous horizontal scroll bars.

Cross-browser compatabiliy - a must!
Even if you like a certain browser or your site utilises special features of a browser, others do use different browsers and unless you want to lose a large audience you have to tweak your code or provide a different version for other browsers. It may not be possible to tailor it to work in Mosaic version 1.0, but at least make sure it works with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape.