Before you proceed on, I would encourage you to spend sometime reading Introduction to HTML, if you have not done so. Also, you need to know HTML, preferably inside out and not just the gist of it. Most of the time, web construction consists of three stages. The pre web construction stage, the article you are at, the developing and programming stage, also know as construction stage, and lastly the production stage. Do take note that you do not have to follow the way I present the steps towards constructing a website. It is easy to construct a website, however there are many factors to take note of, especially in every stage. Let me show you some of the points that you should take note before creating a website.

You need know what is the purpose of your website. What you want to talk about and what you want to get across to other people. Examples of a web site purpose are, to promote a product, a discussion area (forum) or sharing your own views, such as blogs. Feel free to have multiple purposes on your website. As for mine, Sleuthz.com, my purpose of this website is to share my web construction experience with other web developers, besides I like doing this!

This term is usually used for advertisements, it refers to a specified audience whom the company wants the advertisement to be targeted at. For instance, tour companies, their target audience are tourists or people who have interest in touring. Once you have thought of the purpose of your website, the target audience should be quite obvious. Target audience is not necessary for all websites as some have no intention to get their content to anyone. However, it is very important to know your target audience if you want a successful site with a lot of traffic. For your information, traffic refers to the people visiting your website. High traffic means many visitors while low means little visitors.

So, when you have a purpose for your website, you can start thinking of your content. Do take the target audience into consideration. If your target audience are children below 13 years of age, you wouldn't want to use bombastic words. Talk about words, I would advise you to use simple English. That will save your viewers trouble of referring to the dictionary, just to understand your content. If you want to promote a product or have a huge traffic, content is very important. A picture shows a thousand words. Some people just hate reading through long wordy texts just to gain information. This is where images come into handy. Images helps to illustrate your content better and compliments your website template. I'll go deeper into this later on. You can also choose to have big or small content.

The layout of a website is the content structure, how you want to present your content. The way you want to structure your content and not how the content looks, in order words, not the web template. They are two different things. Websites usually contain a header, navigation bar and a footer aside from its content. The layout for a website defines the placements for all these segments. This is the layout of my website, as an example There are many, many ways of laying out your website. These are just four of the common ones As you can see, layout of a site is making use of shapes to display your layout segments. As squares and rectangles are being played around with, the layout starts to form columns and rows. Fig 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are commonly known as 2 column layout while Fig 1.5 is known as 3 column layout. Usually, web developers like to use squares and rectangles, because they are easy to construct. However, as we move on towards the future, I'm sure our demands from IT will grow and we won't want to expect squares and rectangles. This is for experienced people in HTML. If you want to attempt a complex layout, I recommend you Layout Cookbook. It does not provide you with HTML or anything, it just shows you shapes which can be used as layouts for your layout segments. Really nice and interesting layouts.

Once you have a rough idea on your layout and content, you can start to think and 'dream' about how you want your website to look like. It is recommended that your design is related to the content. It won't be right if you have a car design for a gardening website, would it? The design template requires softwares such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint (which is free on Windows computers) and other various designing softwares. It would be better if you have designing experiences such as knowing the principles of design and colour contrast. If you are stuck, take a look at other paid website templates on the internet to get a general idea of a web design.

Nothing is really done here. Maybe some scribbles on paper and a draft of the completed website, couples of arrow pointing here and there to indicate what you expect. If you are doing so, you are probably going good so far!