So you have decided to build a website. Whether it is for a company or for your own personal use, you will want to keep the following basics in mind before getting started. It may surprise you how much should go into a good website before you even begin constructing it. Furthermore, it will decrease the odds of having to start over from scratch in the long run.
Find Your Niche
First and most important, you want to decide who you are trying to reach with your website. Do you want to make information and products available to potential customers, or do you just want Aunt Matilda to see pictures of your kids from somewhere else in the world? It is important to know your audience so that you can deliver what they will expect to see.
If your website is for personal use, the limits are endless. Since your Target Market is just Aunt Matilda, you can just ask for her input and ignore the rest. However, if you are trying to reach potential customers, it opens a whole new bag of worms.
Define Your Customer Base
You need to realize how and why people will be coming to your site. Realize the Keywords and Market you want to target and keep that in mind during the design process. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and is vital to the success of any website. You need to design the site right from the beginning with the proper keywords and phrases in mind, or you will be completely redoing your site in the long run.
Website Design Structure
When you have your market in place, you will want to then come up with a structure that is workable and easy to navigate. Personally, we find that a Dry-Erase Board is the best for this kind of thing. You can define the pages and sections of the website while being able to switch things around easily during the Website Design Process. A good design structure will allow customers to find everything they need, and still be able to get back to where they came from if they find themselves lost.
The Actual Design of the Website
By now you should have a good structure in place and know your target market. Now is the time to start thinking about graphics, color schemes, layout, fonts, and so forth. One of the things that might seem like a good idea at first is to use frames for your website. It is a common mistake made by beginners. The search engines have a hard time with frames, and until they come up with a fix for this (and it is debated that they even want to) you should avoid them as a beginner.
Read Page 2 of Basic Website Design