Content

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

It's your job to decide 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 just read the content. Often this is a compromise. Especially when you think about accessibility. Making your site available to visually impaired readers.

Write down some ideas, again very rough. Then get some more paper and start drawing. 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 around, it's easy to 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 navigation kept in the same place. we've done this a lot on code-warrior - each page is virtually identical, except for the content and minor changes in the navigation. The reason for doing this is to keep things simple for your 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 changing every page.

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. Remember not everyone can read red on green.

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. Don't forget the more images you use the longer your site will take to appear on someone else's computer.

Changing Your Mind

At some point you're bound to decide you don't like to colour of something on the site. 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 change things often, I'd suggest you read about CSS and implement one from the beginning, rather than clearing up hundreds of FONT tags later.

Click here for a guide to CSS.

Next up is the all important navigation of your site.