Before you venture into design territory and build your website make sure you have all the necessary tools and mainly a plan. Without it you will go back and forth from coding to Photoshop to Dreamweaver to CSS files in a merry go round while wasting a lot of your valuable time.

Methodical Web Design

1. Map out the structure of your site
   Decide the pages, titles, and the folders where you’ll store them. Establish parent directories and subdirectories. For instance, I am currently working on redesigning my web design & marketing site for Satori Solution Inc. I know I will have a public-html directory on the root of the website so I have created several folders under this that will store separate files. It is easier to keep track of everything. All my css files I have them stored into a css folder. All the images (jpg, png and gif) are under the image folder, and so on.
2. Use Logical Names for Files & Folders
   Stop using the same old “contactus.html) name coding. This will not score you brownie points with Google. In fact that is lame and web surfers will not even know that this particular page even belongs to your website. Instead, use a meaningful name like yourcompanyname-get-in-touch.html or contact-us-yourcompanyname.html. Your webpages will be indexed in no time by search engines and they will make sense when they are posted on the web.
3. Replace spaces with dashes for your webpage titles
   That’s right – spaces are automatically replaced with that ugly “%” symbol every time it finds a space in the title of a webpage. That is why you should even replace the title of a pdf file that you might want web visitors to download with something like that: http://www.designbysatori.com/how-to-promote-your-business.pdf
4. Test, test & test again
   Once you are finished with the entire site, start testing. Test it from different computers, different resolutions, and different browsers. I have made the mistake back in my young designer years of launching a website without fully testing it in Mac based browsers and after uploading it I was asked by an advertising shop (who of course was a Mac shop) how come they are not seeing the website correctly. Some other time I designed a site as if 800 x 600 was the only resolution available. Of course it looked great to me, but when I switched to a wide screen laptop with a 1280 x 768 pixels, everything looked tiny and very unappealing. So test links and menu items. Take your time and test everything.
5. Publish only when done
   Once you have completed the testing stage, let the site “cool down” a bit. Go back and revisit to make sure you have everything in place and you are ready to upload. DO NOT put an “Under Construction” sign on the temporary site. This is something you’d do back in the 90’s. It doesn’t fly anymore and it looks silly. Leave it as is, with the splash page provided by the hosting company. Usually GoDaddy or JustHost (I am sure many others do the same) have an already splash page letting people know that particular site is hosted with them.

Of course there is a lot in between, but here I just wanted to give you 5 easy pointers that you might forget. I hope that helped and hopefully you’ll get them done right.

Happy webbing!

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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