What is the First Step?

The first step in designing a website is most likely the most
crucial step in determining the success of a website. Let's
compare a website to building a house. Everyone knows the 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 the 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 the sites that fail, because their
webmasters get frustrated with the site and the 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 the purpose of your site.
Having the purpose written down on paper will make it seem more
"real" than keeping the idea in your head. Also, it's real easy
to get distracted on the Internet, so having the purpose written
out on paper will help keep you on track.

What's Next?

Now that we have our site's purpose, we need to determine how our
site is going to fulfill this purpose. These will be the site's
objectives. On that same sheet of paper that you wrote out your
site's purpose, draw a line all the way across the paper. Now,
underneath that line, write down three one-sentence objectives
for your site to accomplish.

Now that we have our site's purpose and our site's objectives all
written down and planned out, you are going to have to keep that
sheet of paper next to your computer in plain sight at all times.
Every time you do something on your computer, I want you to ask
your self, "Is this helping my site accomplish its objectives and
fulfill its purpose?" If you answer no, then you should think
about finding something that will make you answer "yes" to that
question.

File/Folder Order

Another thing we should do before we move on is to determine how
our files and our folders will be stored. Here we have several
options, we can put everything in one folder, we can have a
images folder and put all the HTML files one folder, or we can
have every major section of our site in its own subfolder with
each subfolder having its own images folder.

Putting everything in one folder works great for small sites, but
when your site reaches 500+ pages, updating the site is going to
become a pain. Finding the page to update will be a big task in
itself, let alone updating the whole site because you added a new
section.

Having one images folder and putting all the HTML in one folder
works a little bit better, but once again, updating the site is
going to be time consuming.

The best way, in my opinion, is to put every major section of the
site within its own folder. That way, whenever you need to
update something, you will know exactly where it is. You won't
have to waste time by hunting through many files trying to find
the right one.

Looking back now, you should be glad that you didn't just jump
into the code. A lot of work has to go into a site before even
one line of code can be written. There are many more steps ahead
before we start coding our site. The Second Step deals with
colors and navigation of your site.

About the Author
Jesse Seymour
http://web-source1.hypermart.net
Your Source for Web Design and Promotion!