At this stage you need to decide on the design of your website. This is very important, as it will create the look and feel of your site.
Consistency is especially important with websites so that the person knows that they are still in the same site.
To start with it is best to draw some scathes of your page design. The only problem with designing on paper is that what looks good on paper does not always look good on a computer screen.
Next you need to try your design on a computer screen, to do this open up your favourite graphics program with a blank canvas of 783 x 398 pixels (this is the minimum live space of a web browser on a 800 x 600 resolution screen). Now you can start laying out your screen design.
By using a graphics program you can see how your web page design will look on a computer screen and if the colours don't look good, or the layout is wrong you can easily change colours or move the layout around the screen till the page design looks good.
It is much easier trying out your page designs in a graphics program as it takes seconds to move things around the screen, as opposed to an HTML page where it can take hours rearranging the layout of a page.
The image on the right shows the design layout of this site in the graphics program Macromedia Fireworks before any HTML was written.
By using a graphics program you can see how your web page design will look on a computer screen and if the colours don't look good, or the layout is wrong you can easily change colours or move the layout around the screen till the page design looks good. 