17th May 2008

Designing Page Layout - A look at webpage layouts

Welcome to the part 3 of our tutorial where we look at the page layout.

1 - Finding a host	2 - Programs	3 - Designing page layout
4 - Designing part 2	5 - Intro to HTML	6 - Intro to HTML Part 2
7 - Creating the page

This part of the course will help you design the look of your website, obviously you have your own ideas of what you want your site to look like, but they are a few things you should keep in mind when deciding on a layout.

One of the most important things is to make the site easy to use, ie, easy to navigate through the different pages, to do this it is best to make the linking structure simple and explanatory.

If the site is quite large then it might be an idea to create a sitemap so users can see all of the different sections of your site from one page.

Later on in this course we will be showing you how to create an effective sitemap.

This short course will outline the basics of HTML and get you making your first website with ease.

The first thing to do would be to sketch what you want your homepage to look like, for instance think about where you want the links to the other pages, where you want your logo etc.

When you have a basic idea of what you want it to look like, the next step is to consider how many pages you want, obviously pages can be added as often as you like, so it is important to make the site easy to upgrade, ie leave enough room for more links.

For the sake of this tutorial we are going to assume that we want to create 5 pages, with the basic layout seen below:

As you can see this is a nice simple layout, when looking at the above example it is split into 3 sections the logo/title, the links section and the main content, this makes it easier to manage, for instance you could have a template where the logo and links are already there and you can just fill in the different content for each page, making it easier to add more pages.

The next stage is to split the page into these 3 sections.

Click here to continue the tutorial.