i'm going to draw out the things i normally doand i'm going to use a white board because it's easier to see on the cameranormally i do this on paper four sheets of blank a4 copy paper and i keep all the old versionsso i can see how my thinking developed on a certain thing and so the first thing i would do is onsimply draw a big square and by the way my drawing and writing is quite bad sokeep that in mind. i'm a
programmer not a graphic designer that's pretty unusual just right ok so ok so here's our home page now one simple thing you'll see on almost everywebsite you visit is you'll notice that the logo is up in the that top left hand corner. that's astandard thing you see in most websites another standard thing you'll seeis there's a navigation bar or menu
some people have it down the left handside. usually always see them across the top aswell. you see it on amazonand other sites with that so this is going to be our navigationmenu or nav menu and we can consider some of thepages we're going to have here almost every site will have a contact page let's write 'contact' there that almost everyone will havean about so about and contact are pretty standard
other things you might have in there let's say we're doing a site for a business thatsells bicycles and so what we'll have are mountain bikes i'll shorten to m_t_b and we'll have electric bikes because this is a very green country
and a green company. so we've got mountain bikes, electric bikes, we'vegot about us and contact us. so there some of the standard pages. sowe've just drawn that in next thing to consider is what we'regoing to have if this is pam it is the home page we're going to a have a different designthan if it's a main content page so i mean by that is safe for examplethe contact page is going to have a contact form so if i were drawing the contact page andlet's say it looked something
like this then underneath that it's got it's got say a google map over here i'll write that in as g-map street lex for here it's gonna have a phone numbers so then an address
on their addresses is here and then they've got this email contactform email subject so and then 'message' here. you get the idea so you can do this for everyone of your pages so not justfor example of the contact page
do another page so the for example for the about us page the standard thing i do is is say okay this is the going to bethe main content area we're going to have some text here,lines like that. so we're gonna have image here
some people do images draw somethinglike that. another image here had have some more text here what you can do is that for themain content pages on your website just to get a basic idea of how you're going to lay them out you'll notice that i left this space blankthis could be a sidebar of some sort maybe this has the latest stufffrom your twitter stream and or maybe its a list of all the pageson the website if you've loads of pages
or it could be the latest posts fromyour blog. sidebars can do lots of things. instead of having the sidebaron the left you could have the sidebar on right sideor you could have two sidebars so lots of ways to lay this out it's really useful if you take everypage on your website. you've got your, will draw it in here, so we've got we've got home mountain bikes, electric bikes
about, contact and if you take every pageon your website are at least in the menu and just draw it out on a sheet of paper just to get the basic concepts down. theexact layout doesn't matter you mightn't want your navigation bar thereyou might want it down the left you might want to spent some timethinking about what to put in the footer your of your website. there's lots ofthings you can do the important thing is just get the the basic information down on paper