Content

OK, let's talk style. Unfortunately there's no simple rules for designing good looking and functional sites, and often it comes down to personal opinions.

It's your job to suss out what the most common opinions will be amongst your site's visitors. This will vary between sites depending on the content - who is your target audience? Will they prefer a flashy site which looks great, or would they rather cut the rubbish and get straight to the point?

Scribble down some ideas, again very rough. Then get some more paper (still no computers I'm afraid) and start doodling. What do you want your pages to look like? This plan comes in very useful if you start using large and complicated tables for layout - with all those COLSPAN and ROWSPAN's flying around, you'll quickly get confused.

Here's an important tip - no matter how big your site, be consistent. Each page should have a similar layout with features and tools kept in the same place. I've done this a lot on HTML Central - each page is virtually identical, except for the content obviously. The reason for doing this is to keep things simple for your visitors (complicated site = confused visitors) and to aid navigation, which we'll talk about more in the next section.

By deciding how you want things to look now, you'll save yourself a lot of time later. There's nothing more annoying than creating an entire site only to decide that you want things to look different. In most cases, you'll end up recoding every page. Great fun.

Colour

Colour is another difficult area. In the early stages you should be starting to think about what sort of colour scheme to use, and this should tie into the other stylistic decisions you've made. If you've got a simple layout, keep the colours simple. If you're being more jazzy, more colours may be called for.

One mistake that people tend to make is to use too many colours. Titles are all different colours, one minute red is used to highlight and then it's blue. As I said above, keep everything consistent.

My personal rule of thumb is to have a maximum of 5 or 6 different colours (not including graphics). Fire up your graphics app, choose some colours that go well together and make a note of the all important hex codes.

Graphics

Images can brighten up a site, but can also make it very difficult to use. Start thinking about what images are appropriate to your site and where they should go. Have a browse through your clip art and see what fits in. Find things that tie into your content, layout and colour schemes.

Changing Your Mind

At some point you're bound to decide you don't like to colour of something. One way to minimise the disruption caused by this is to use cascading style sheets (CSS). If you're the sort of person who likes to tweak things, I'd suggest you brush up on CSS and implement it from the beginning, rather than clearing up hundreds of FONT tags later.

Click here for a guide to CSS.

Wait!

There's something else you should consider before getting set on your brilliant design - navigation. Read on, then you might want to think again.