Once you have some basic concept of how HTML works, you will know enough to begin designing your web site. Really, even thinking about HTML code before designing the site is a little backward, but you can do a better site design if you understand some of the capabilities and limitations of HTML itself.

Designing a site for yourself, or for someone else, largely consists of knowing how to ask the right questions. Here are some things you should consider, and what the answers might mean:

Why are you building a web site?

This question may sound pathetically obvious, but you would be amazed at how many people are creating a web site simply because they want to have one like everyone else. If the answer to this question is, "Because I feel like having a website," or some variant of this, then be honest with yourself: First, you don't need a web site. Second, if you insist on putting one online anyway, then fill it with the obligatory, "Hi, my name is XYZ and this is my site. Here are some pictures of my vacation in Backroad, Oklahoma." Then get used to the idea that once your mom gets tired of it, no one else will visit.

The harsh reality of the web is that there are millions of sites online, and unless yours has something to offer visitors, it won't be worth their time. Your purpose may be to educate (informational sites), to persuade (political or religious sites), to entertain, to build a virtual community (not an easy thing to do without some server-side programs, by the way), or to sell (ditto the previous point). Note that "selling" may not mean "making a profit." If your nonprofit organization puts a site online soliciting donations, or recruiting members, then that too is a form of selling.

Figure out, carefully, what you want to accomplish with your web site. That will determine the kind of content you need, how often the site needs to be updated, and how large (how many pages) it will need to be. Your site may have more than one purpose, and if that is the case, you need to consider whether these goals can be achieved by a single, unified site or if you will need multiple major sections.

Who is your intended audience?

What kind of person will visit your site? Think like an advertising agency, in terms of demographics. Are you trying to attract teenagers? College students? Senior citizens? Parents with children living at home? Survivors of a serious disease? People living in a certain city or county? People sharing a common hobby or interest? Your family (a perfectly legitimate demographic, if for instance you are using a web site to collaborate on tracing your geneology)? Do you aim for people of a particular ethnic or cultural background? Political attitude? Gender? Financial situation? Line of work?

Once you know who are the people whom you want visiting, you need to understand what they will be seeking when they arrive. What are their likely expectations about the way things are written, or the kind of pictures and icons they expect to see? Different demographic groups will be drawn to different colors, different page layouts, different navigational styles.

Think about demographics, but don't stereotype your target audience. Not all senior citizens are interested only in health care and pension funds. Not all women think only about child care and household appliances. Not all engineers want to spend their spare time reading technical manuals.

Try working your demographics in reverse. Instead of asking, "If I build this kind of site, will I get XYZ kind of person to visit?" turn it around. Think of what you want your audience to do, or to feel, or to learn, then ask, "How can I get XYZ kind of people, who might not otherwise be interested, to become interested?" Think outside the fleeblewag!

Now, what is your content?

There used to be a saying among web designers that "content is king." It's become clich�now, but it is still true. People will get "hooked" the first visit on your layout, colors, and graphics. But they will only come back if you give them more than eye candy. Build content that your guests will value, and they will come back again and again.

Be careful of copyright laws! If your site is devoted to a popular movie series, or to a celebrity fan club, or to a brand of car, for instance, you may be very limited as to what pictures and other graphics you are allowed to display. Just because a picture is found on the Internet does not mean it is in the public domain, and that goes for those cute little icons and background textures, too.

How does your content naturally want to organize?

Assuming you plan more content than will fit on one page, give some thought to how it should be organized. Sometimes this is fairly easy: If you are doing a web site on the fifty United States, it is natural to make one page, or perhaps one group of pages if your site is large, per state. But what if your site is on cooking? There are recipes, utensils, famous chefs, historical aspects, nutritional concerns, and so forth. Do you divide recipes by the type of dish, or by how difficult they are to prepare? Or, if your cooking site emphasizes history, do you perhaps divide them according to the century in which they were first known?

Walk through some "typical" visits in your mind. Pretend that you are a person interested in whatever topic(s) your site covers. You have just arrived at the home page. How will you find what you are seeking? Taking the cooking example again, most anyone who visits the site might expect to see a big, clickable link that says "Recipes," or perhaps a number of more specific links.

Consider making your site link-rich, meaning that there are many ways to reach any given portion of your content. It is perfectly okay to have more than one list of topics, arranged in different ways. Tell the visitor what you had in mind with each of these indices, by giving it a descriptive name. For example, on our hypothetical cooking site you might have a page that is "Recipes by Historical Period," another called "Recipes by Difficulty Level," and still a third entitled "Recipes by Category." Bear in mind that a link-rich site also requires considerable work every time you change the name of a page or remove or add a page. If you want to take this approach, consider using an automated web authoring program to do this "grunt" work, as soon as your site gets beyond a very few pages in size.

How will visitors navigate from page to page?

Now that you have organized your content, decide how many pages you need for starters and how you will link them from the home page. Will your home page consist of mainly topic headings, each of which is a link to the selected page? Or will you need multiple sub-menu pages organized along major topic lines?

Generally, your navigation will work best if it is simple. The idea is to help visitors find what they need, not to confuse them so that they are sure to visit every page. There are actually sites that try to do this, garnering as many page "hits" as possible. But such sites seldom get repeat visitors, because people leave feeling frustrated and maybe even angry.

It is usually a good idea to have a link on every page that takes visitors back to your main home page. That way, if they do get confused they can always start over. This serves another purpose as well: Suppose the visitor arrived at one of your content pages from a search engine, without ever visiting your home page. If they like what they see on that one page, they might very well want to browse the rest of your site! This is exactly what you wanted, right? So make it easy for them to find your home page.

Another good thing to put on every page is some kind of link or other method for the visitor to contact you if there is a problem with the page, or if they have suggestions or corrections. Internet audiences, in general, are free with both praise and criticism, and you can learn a lot from feedback received from visitors. If they want to tell you about a problem, or offer suggestions for new features, make it easy to do so.

While considering your site's navigation scheme, you may want to visit other sites that are related or similar. Find sites in your chosen subject area that you like, and find some that you don't like. Figure out what separates the "like" from the "don't like" in your mind, and then let those characteristics guide your design. Consider also that the people who visit your site may also have visited these other sites. So if your site's navigation works like the "best of breed" related sites, many visitors will feel quite comfortable from the very start, and will tend to subtly prefer your site over others.