The first step in designing a website is most likely most crucial step in determining success of a website. Let's compare a website to building a house. Everyone knows first step in building a house. You have to plan everything out and have a strong foundation to build on.

A website is no different from a house. In fact, a website is your digital dream home, and only you can build it how you like. Most websites that fail on World Wide Web because they lack a solid foundation on which to expand. In this article, I will show you how to create a solid foundation for your site and how to plan and organize your site.

Starting Out

A lot of people, when they set out to design a website, fire up their fancy WYSIWYG editor and start pushing keys left and right. They probably didn't stop to think about how their site would be organized, where their files would go, or even where they would host their site.

These sites are most often sites that fail, because their webmasters get frustrated with site and deadends and mental blocks that they hit. All this can be avoided if a site is properly planned out. Almost every professional site has spent a significant amount of time planning out their site.

Where to Start?

The best place to start planning out a site is with it's purpose. A site without a purpose will almost always stagnate and fail. On an 8 X 11 piece of paper, write out purpose of your site. Having purpose written down on paper will make it seem more "real" than keeping idea in your head. Also, it's real easy to get distracted on Internet, so having purpose written out on paper will help keep you on track.

What's Next?

Some of most god-awful sites I’ve ever seen have used frames. To be fair though, I’ve seen some that used tables that were just as bad.

Frames require what is called a "Frameset" page. This is most important thing. If it’s layed out weird, then frames will either A.) Not work at all, or B.) look hideous! The Frameset page is just what it says, a framework for rest of site. In each section (or Frame) there is a complete webpage, even if it’s just a graphic. The Frameset page tells browser WHERE each of these complete pages goes. So if you have a page with lots of information crammed into a narrow frame what you get is frustrating for visitor at best.

Good rule of thumb… Keep it Simple!!! Some of most annoying framed pages I’ve ever seen are ones that have a bazillion different frames. And when I say a bazillion, I mean anything over say three, at most four. The human eye can only handle seeing so many little sections, and especially on Internet! When I go to set up a framed page I ask myself a few questions.

1.Is it easy on eye? In other words, am I dizzy looking at it. 2.Does it make sense? Is general layout reasonable. 3.Could effect I’m trying to achieve be accomplished using tables instead?

If answer to first two questions is yes, then go ahead and set it up. However, if there is a shred of doubt, try option Three.

Tables

Tables have their own quirks though. The biggest one that I’ve seen is browser compatibility factor. Netscape and IE see tables very differently. I’ve found that to overcome this annoying problem to do a blend of tags that both read.

Basically what tables are is a series of rows and cells that allow one to neatly organize information and images, rather like those shadow boxes that you use to display knick-knacks.