Fundamentals of Web Page Construction and Loading Web Pages on the Server
Bookmarks: A Guide To Research and Writing (Ruskiewicz, Walker and Pemberton) Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Building and designing a web page and/or a web site requires patience and organization skills tinged with an interior deocorator's flair for what is visually appealing (not appalling), yet workable.
Patience
Building web pages requires devotion to painstaking detail and a desire to will those details into a comprehensible and pleasing order. It is a tedious process, one that requires a lot of trial and error when first starting out. Stick with it, and after you have gone through the process several times, the technical aspects of the procedure will become second nature.
Organization
The thing to keep in mind that is of paramount importance in organizing your website is to KEEP THE SAME ARCHITECTURE on both your desktop and on the server when you load your pages. This must be done in order to ensure that the path (the directions provided for where to find files) will be the same for both environments—both your desktop and the server.Failure to do this is the greatest pitfall that beginning web site designers encounter.
Although this is not the only way to structure a site, it is a straightforward, intuitive approach.
Appeal
A web page can do many things. Among others, it can do a couple of important things: inform and entertain. These two possibilities are always in competition when designing a page. While current trends in web page design run towards complexity (look at most professional sites and the way they cram information in on the initial page), there is a lot to be said for maintaining simplicity.White space on a page allows the eye to "recover" and suggests a way for the eye to move across the page. [Notice how when you look at a page where there is little white space, your eye doesn't seem to know where it should go.]
Especially when the goal of a web page is to inform (like with any sort of presentation), a simpler approach will pay higher dividends.
Other sites of interest on this topic:
For an example of what not to do: