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Build Your Own Website the Right Way Using HTML & CSS

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CSS Web Site Design: Includes Exercise Files and Training Videos (Hands-On Training Series)

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

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How to Design Your Website

How to Plan Your Website

Before you begin building the web pages that will make up your site, do some preliminary planning and organization:

Draft a site plan.
Draw a site map.
Organize files into folders and directories.
Assemble your content.

Draft a Site Plan

Your site plan outlines the purpose and goals of your website. It should address the following issues:

Purpose: Clarify your reasons for building the site and list the site’s goals, ranked by importance.
Audience: Define the types of users you expect your site to attract.
User acquisition: Explain how you intend to attract your audience—through advertising, word of mouth, special promotions, and so on.
Content: Detail what types of text and images you want your site to contain.
Look and feel: Describe the site’s aesthetics, such as the color palette you’d like to use and the overall tone or attitude you intend to convey.
Layout: Consider how you’ll organize each page to allow users to navigate easily among pages on the site.
Schedule: Determine deadlines for creating drafts of the site and launching the final product.

Draw a Site Map

Once you have your site plan in place, you’re ready to create a site map, or a visual depiction of your site’s basic architecture. Use the site map as a blueprint when creating the pages that make up your website. Your site map should include each of the site’s main pages and show how they link together to form the overall hierarchy of the website.

You can draw a site map on paper or with image editing software, such as Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. A site map for a book-review site might look like this:

Organize Files into Folders and Directories

Websites are essentially collections of files located on a server and organized in a particular structure, called a directory structure. Note that what you probably call folders on your computer are called directories on the web. Folders and directories serve the same purpose: to organize related files into groups and subgroups.

When you make your website, you’ll create the files on your computer and then upload them to the proper directories on your web host’s server (see How to Publish Your Website). To streamline the process of uploading your site’s files from your hard drive to your server, create a group of folders on your hard drive that mirrors the directories you plan to use on your site. These folders should derive from the components of your site map. For example, to build the book-review site in the site map example above, you’d follow these steps:

Make a main folder for your site on your hard drive and name it appropriately—in this case, “book-review site.”
Create a folder called “home page” in which you’ll place files that you’ll use only on the site’s home page, or front page.
Create separate folders for each of the site’s main components, such as “contact” and “FAQ.”
Create subfolders for any of the site’s main components that require them. In this case, the “book reviews” folder requires three subfolders: “international bestsellers,” “new releases,” and “forthcoming titles.”
Store the files you plan to use for each section of the site within the appropriate folders.

Each folder you create on your hard drive should eventually have a directory on your site with the same name, preceded by a forward slash (/). For example, the files you store in your “contact” folder will eventually reside in an online directory located at http://www.yoursite.com/contact.

But note one exception: the files in your “home page” folder won’t go in a directory called “home page.” Instead, those files will likely reside in the root directory, your site’s topmost directory in which all of your other folders will be stored. You don’t have to match your folder names exactly to your site’s directory names, but doing so may help you keep your files organized.

Create a Separate Folder for Images

It’s a good idea to create one folder in which you store all of your image files and keep only text documents in your main folders. That way, specific image files are easy to find because they all reside in one place. People typically name their image folder “images” or “img.”

Assemble Your Content

Before you can begin to create your web pages, you need to gather all the content you expect your site to contain when you launch, or first publish, the site. The core content of most sites is text and images.

Text: This includes introductory material, biographical information about you and/or your organization, main content, and any other information that will appear on your site. You can create this content with standard word processing software and import it into your web page documents later.
Images: These are the photos, illustrations, logos, and other visual material you plan to include on your site (see How to Add Images to Your Web Pages).

As you gather and create your content, make sure to store it within the proper folders. For example, once you’ve assembled the text for your contact information page, store the files that contain that text in your “contact” folder. As you assemble image files, store all of the files in your image folder.

Acknowledgments & Disclaimer