Designing a website is a completely different task from designing a webpage. There are three key issues to decide when you design your website.
Every website should offer visual cues that define its identity. You can customize each webpage on your site; this is not a straight jacket. However, your visitors should have enough cues once they click a link to know if they are still at your website or if they’ve gone someplace else. For example, EarthChronicle.com uses a consistent color scheme and navbar to identify itself.
Plan how your pages will be linked together. When a visitor is at one page, what other pages would be interesting, relevant to what they are doing. Note that this is exactly the same as asking the question, “What internal links do I want to make between webpages?” This involves a lot of planning and thinking about how your visitors will use your website.
Feel free to ask friends. However, this is another reason why getting feedback from your visitors is so valuable. Occasionally you run into a web publisher that considers feedback an inconvenient irritation, but when viewed this way it becomes obvious that feedback is a gold mine… it’s someone else's way of looking at your website. It can give you critical information about who is visiting your website and what they are actually doing with it, ie how people are using your site. I’m a big believer in using HTML forms and/or providing contact emails to solicit feedback so you can build a better structure for your website. You'll see all kinds of information on the net about not posting your email address on the web. There are some good reasons for this, so don't post YOUR email address, get a free email account somewhere specifically for the website, so that you CAN post a contact email. If it gets spammed, you can always change to another email account.
Every webpage should have a pretty standard set of navigation tools, like the navigation bar you see at the top of all EarthChronicle.com webpages. This allows visitors to navigate freely around the main areas of your website even if a search engine as plopped them smack in the middle of your site on some random page.
Holding Pages: Broken links are the most common problem afflicting webpages, and one of the hardest areas of website maintenance if you don’t have the right tools. I am a big believer in using a broken link finder to keep your site functioning smoothly with a minimum of pain on your part.
Don’t underestimate the importance of planning your webpages. It is very difficult to build internal links for a complicated section of webpages if the pages don’t exist. Look at how EarthChronicle.com Atlas works, and imagine trying to build it one page at a time. You’d have to place the links from the webpages to the others after you get finished building each page. What a pain! (Actually, if you're in the mood for a laugh, this is exactly the way we DID build the Atlas, and it was such a NIGHTMARE, we've used this method ever since... it works a thousand times better.) It’s much easier to plan everything out on paper, decide on names for each webpage, and sleep on it so that you’re sure. Then create a holding page for all the names you’ve decided on and you can replace them with the real webpages as you get them built.
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