Designing Web Sites is both a complex and rewarding activity. Hours of careful thought are needed at the planning stage. You need to take time to think about, who will be reading your pages. Then consider the message you want to communicate via the web site and how best to do it?
Then you need to consider the possibilities and limitations of web publishing to determine how you actually create the site.

Here are some points to think during planning stages of a web site:

• Know Your Audience
• What Technologies do your users have?
• Consider Your Own Objective
• Structure Information
• Developin a Graphic Look
• Desirable Site Elements
• Testing Your Design
• Trends in Web Site Design

We site design should be driven by audience considerations. It doesn’t matter how powerful a server you have, how skilled a Java programmer you are, or how flashy your graphics are if your message is lost on the end user. Since most sites have to be designed to provide maximum audience appeal, lets look at two broad categories of audience characteristics :

How will Users move through the information?
A web site is different from a single web page in that a user can visit many major sections within a site. By developing an awareness of how people think about the information you’re presenting, you can design a structure that is intuitive and that harnesses the natural associations your audience members are likely to make. You cannot know how all your users think, but you can usually make some valid generalizations that can guide you during the design process.

Think about how you can use those characteristics to achieve the following design objectives:

• Make use of Association by providing hypertext links to the other web pages related to the same subject as the material on your web site.
• Make use of Consistency in approach of look and feel, navigation, presentation of information on your web site. Use borders, navigation bars, and quick search box to produce easy to use interface.
• Make use of Context as you can never predict on which page a user will enter your site. If you provide context (i.e. position of the page in site hierarchy and links to other options within site) on home page the user will be unaware of the avaiiable options in your web site.

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