Planning A Website

Decide how to structure the content you are providing

Design a look-and-feel

It is only at this stage that we begin to worry about what the site will actually look like. In theory, the possibilities for the look-and feel of your website are infinite, only restricted by your imagination, which is one reason why having a good plan is so important. The goals and minimum requirements of your plan place strict restrictions on how your look-and-feel can be designed, and when combined with the general guidelines of good search engine optimisation practices, designing the look-and-feel becomes a lot easier.

I'm not going to go into too much detail on how you should design your look-and-feel here, but I will mention some things you need to be aware of.

Navigation

Your navigation system should be clear, and easy for your user to understand and use. Designing your navigation system should be easy once you have an explicit site structure. For SEO reasons, you should use text links in your navigation, rather than images and the text you use should be as descriptive as possible.

Template layout

You should remember when selecting a general layout for your template, that your users may be using several different browsers, at different screen resolutions. You should try to ensure that your site will display properly on all browsers and screen resolutions. Remember the types of content that will have to fit into your template, and ensure that it will be easy to read. It is not a good idea, for example, to cram long articles into thin columns that can only fit a few words on a line, but this may work for product pages with little text.

Colour palette

You should select a colour palette of about 5 complementary colours before you start your design, and stick to them. Try to avoid using coloured text and backgrounds for the main content on your page – black text on a white background in by far the easiest to read.

Using images

The inventive use of images and colour can take an otherwise drab site and turn it into a professional looking, impressive site, but you should try to keep the use of images to a minimum. Try not to include text in your images, as search engine spiders cannot read this text. Your images should not be more than about 20Kb in size, and the total size for all the images on your site should be less than 50Kb.

Placing adverts

Placing advertising on your site can be an extremely lucrative way of making money, but you should ensure that the adverts don't distract from the content of your pages. Your users will leave your site very quickly (and not use the adverts) if they are presented with a page full of adverts. Remember that you cannot give every part of your page pride of place, so you will have to decide which is more important to you – your visitors using your menu system, or viewing adverts.

Bells and whistles

The sheer range of what can be done on websites these days is astounding, but 99% of the time, you don't need them, and users will actually not appreciate them. Search Engine spiders do not read the JavaScript on your site, so you should refrain from using JavaScript for anything you need the search engines to know about, especially the navigation system. Things that scroll or flash on your page can be incredibly distracting, and often irritate your users.

Decide how to structure the content you are providing