Designing your website

Website design is very important, This section is not really on how to make a website, but rather on how you imagine your website before making it, once you have a good idea on what your website should look like you can start thinking of ways and learning them to implement the idea.

You should have a pen at this stage and write down your thoughts. You should finally roughly sketch the website you are planning to make.

If at some point you don't understand what we are talking about, Just read it and you will get the picture once you move on to the building section.

An idea of the structure:

You should have a good idea of the sections on your website,

Navigation: You should make up your mind on how people should navigate from the front door to anywhere else on the website and then navigate again from there to somewhere else on your website, possibly backwards.

The best way is to point your web browser to your favorite easy to use website and take note of how they have there website structured, you can find out the subdirectory details from the address bar on your browser.

Layout:

Frames: Frames are something i should warn you about, Although very convenient, they are a disaster, Search engines index pages within frames individually, then when someone makes a search on the internet he will probably end up in a frame component page and can not see all the others, this means that he might not be seeing your navigation or your header frame.

A Frames page mounts a certain number of other pages into your browser, If you are going to give someone an address of a certain page on your website (including linking to your page from other websites), you would probably have to make a frame page to display that page with the other frames and then send him to that frames page!

What to do then ?

Instead of using frames, You have many alternatives, Some alternatives require programming, for example in PHP you could simply use an include("page_name") function, some other simpler alternatives to using frames come with the software you use, for example you could make a fully designed page using FrontPage and call it template, then make copies of that page and filling them with the real page content, but before you rush to implement this solution lets think of it this way, when you would like to update a link in the navigation panel (part of your template page) you would have to open all the pages and modify it, Ok there is a simple solution for this that you will encounter in the build section (Hint: FrontPage Insert ==> Web Component ==> included content - Page)

You can also use CSS to simplify updating and changing your website, Many of your options we are going to talk about in the build section.

Colors:

Some colors go well together others don't, close colors are good next to each other but not over each other, violet text over red background is very hard to read, best contrast colors are obvious, black or blue text over white background, or yellow text over black background, many combinations work, white, navy blue and black are the only recommended text color.

Style:

this one is the easiest to see hardest to explain, it is about the language that is going to be used, the colors you will be using, The lets say attitude of your website.

Using templates:

Many ready to use templates are available with leading website building software, many more are on the internet, some of them free some are not, weather to build your website from scratch with your own design or use a template (it saves some time) is totally up to you but you should consider both options.