Welcome to Gaia! ::

For me, my tips are based on personal experience maintaining several item guides in GG&R, an alchemy crafting guide, and two RIG guides in GCD.

gaia_crown First, it's not to rely too much on image banners or images hosted outside of Gaia. Reasons include:
1.) Not all Gaians have all images enabled in their site preferences. If the image headers are then blocked from being viewed, those Gaians might be confused with parts of your guide. This also applies to mobile users, as the layout of your guide might look weird if the screen is resized.
2.) Having lots of images may make the page to load slower. Using spoiler tags may help load it faster though.
3.) If your guide is an item guide where you have an image preview per item, it will get tiresome to do that all the time once it reaches more than 50 items. Examples are my velvetine, robin blue and ghastly item lists... sweatdrop
4.) Last is third-party image hosting sites may have sudden changes, like what happened to Photobucket removing its image hosting features unless you upgrade to a paid account or something. I say this from personal experience as several of my guides got discontinued because of that.

gaia_crown I second the saving the entire first page. If you believe that your guide will become larger in the future, you should also reserve several more pages after. You'll understand how helpful this is if you've reached the character limit for a post.

gaia_crown For item guides, if you're still not aware of GaiaUpgrade, I suggest using it as it helps you with copy-paste BBCodes of items much easier and faster. You can find GaiaUpgrade's thread in the Gaia Guides and Resources forum.

gaia_crown You can also choose to disable voting for your guide if you have the feeling that it will become a high salt thread. The advantages though of enabling it is that having a popular tag(having 100 "<3" votes) will make it stand out more, and people will trust your guide more because it's "popular". If you're willing to spend Gaia Cash, you can also promote your thread to attract more attention.

gaia_crown Having a backup of your guide is also useful, in the event that your account may be banned, hacked, or something. This backup can either be in a guild, another thread you own, your mule accounts' thread, etc.

gaia_crown Make sure that the text in your guides are actually readable. Please please PLEASE I BEG YOU, DON'T USE light-colored text. Examples are using yellow text when Gaia's default background color is white, like this: You have good eyesight if you can read this. It makes it hard to read. You also have to consider that some Gaia users have color blindness, so it'll be harder to read your posts. Then there's also the font size. The default size is 12, but don't use anything smaller than 10 if you want people to easily read your posts. Unless your guide has something to do with Snellen charts, eyesight examinations or something. For text headers, font sizes 13 to 24 are recommended.

gaia_crown Also if you're enumerating something, beware of using the number 8 together with the symbol ')'. Otherwise it will end up like this emoji: cool

gaia_crown If users come flaming, offending, or posting insulting things in your thread, do not reply to them. Report them instead. This is much better than getting your thread deleted, or getting banned because you picked a fight with them too.

gaia_crown Another one for item guides or RIG guides, if you're using thumbnail images for items for lists, space out the images. As much as possible, use only 5-10 images per row. If you want to show 20 thumbnail images in a row, using symbols like "|||" can help separate the thumbnails. Example:

This is much easier to read/view...
||| ||| |||

...than this:


That's all I could think of for now. I'll add more later if I come up with more. (This post only started with one. How did I come up with eight more, hahaha...)