How To Plan Your Own Website Design

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Many websites hosted around the web are polished and professionally designed to attract a lot of traffic daily. The most of the professional sites are created and designed by the professional designers and teams that go through all sorts of planning from the structure to the graphics itself even though there are lots of software packages are available for creating websites easily. Steps here are covered in the website designing so that it becomes easier to code.

Designing Navigation Bar
All the homepages have a set of links taking users to all of the other parts of the website. All that is needed in this step can be simply identified by listing them down. You can list them down on a piece of paper and do not need to draw fancy diagrams that are just reserved for the next step. You need to do is that get the general scope of your structures and diagrams in preparations for making a more detailed sitemap.

Sitemap
Sitemap is a diagram showing users all the pages that are included in the website. It shows that how each page is linked to the other pages too. It is necessary to know not only ...
... that how many pages your website will be, but also help determine what your folder structure you want while you are trying to link pages together through coding. No real rules are required in making a sitemap; generally it is done by simply drawing a tree diagram representing each page as a box.

The first box represents the homepage and the tree begins branching out to the main pages listed in the navigational bar of you website. Than if there are any further subpages than they will branch out further. This can be easily done by the graphics design software or with the help of any pen and paper. Software like Microsoft Visio and SmartDraw makes it easy to design. After getting ready double check your sitemap weather it flows and connects properly.

Making few Mock-ups of the Home Page and Other Templates
It should be easier to make a general layout of the homepage with all the links and navigation buttons with the good sitemap at hand. To make the coding faster the mock-ups of homepage are highly recommended. If you are not having any idea about what color scheme or graphics should be used than just start with the basic boxes and lines that are just easy in creating a skeletal structure for things to fit into.

The objective here is about knowing how many columns your layout should have and the estimate of how big the banner should be. If you are having a better idea about what your site is going to look like than you can use also use graphics application like Photoshop for creating more detailed site mock-up. And also try to do the same thing with other templates too.

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