When you first decide to build a Web site, whether epic or modest, you should stop and answer a few basic questions before starting. What is the purpose of your site? What will your site contain? Who is your audience? What do you hope to get out of it? What do you want your visitors to get out of it?

These questions may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised how many Web designers don't think about this stuff until after they have already started creating a site. If you take a little time at the outset to consider these essential questions, the process of creating a coherent look and structure for your site will be much easier.

Ideally, you want to have all of your content finalized first. That way, you'll be able to answer most of the questions above without hesitation. Let's say I work for a stapler company and the boss wants me to assemble a promotional Web site for our products. The boss wants pictures and blurbs about the staplers we offer, detailed spec sheets for each model, customer testimonials, background data on the company, contact information, and links to online articles about our company.

Now, since most of that stuff already exists, I can sit down with all of the content, read it over, and think about the best way to present it on the Web before even turning on the computer.

The same "plan ahead" concept applies to a simple homepage with, say, diary entries you update every day. You might have a couple of entries ready to go, but the content won't be pouring in until after the site is done and online.

In both these cases (business or pleasure sites), you need to consider the type of content you're dealing with and then design your site accordingly.

Since you're just starting out with your diary site, you don't have much content to work with up front. Even though most of your content has yet to be written, a little thinking can give you a clear idea of what that content will look like so you can plan appropriately. If you do decide to build a diary site, you'll be featuring personal material (which is probably on the shorter side), with new content going up on a regular basis. This means your site needs to be easy for you to update (since it'll be changing all the time), and feature a well-organized archive (so your voyeuristic readers can easily access past entries).

Even if you can't have the actual content sitting in front of you as you plan out the site, you can at least say, with conviction, what type of content you'll be offering and what you think your visitors will want.

Figuring out the psychology of your visitors is no easy feat. It's something big Web sites struggle to do on a daily basis. However, it's an essential step in designing your site. Making some educated guesses in these early stages can be an enormous help. For more information on the kind of information site builders are using these days, check out Webmonkey's recent "Marketing Research on the Web" article.

With your content more or less established, you can start putting yourself in your users' shoes: Think staplers. Who will be coming to my stapler site, and why? Do they want to place an order? Are they comparison-shopping? What component of the site will be of greatest interest to the widest range of people? Once somebody visits a certain page, where will they most likely go next? Are these people Web pros or neophytes? Do they need a lot of handholding? What tone should be taken when addressing them: Corporate, irreverent, casual, authoritarian? Again, these predictions can end up being wildly inaccurate, but you should have some theories to get your design rolling.

Once you have a clear picture of your content and your visitors, you can start mapping out the site. At this stage, I would still avoid using the computer. Keep it organic, and brainstorm with other people involved in the project (if there are any). Sketch out a flowchart of the various pieces of information that will make up the site, grouping together related topics and playing around with different relationships between them. Don't worry about what everything will actually look like on the page; just focus on organizational issues. Try to prioritize the various elements according to your psychoanalysis of potential visitors.

For my stapler site, for example, the boss and I decided that the section containing pictures and promotional blurbs about each product would be the most important section, appealing to the majority of our users. Contact information and numbers were also key (maybe not to the visitors, but to the company), so I made sure that these elements were easily accessible. The detailed stapler specs are connected to the blurbs, but supplemental. Not everyone will need to see the specs, but they should be easily accessible from the blurb-and-photo section. Visualizing the way your site may someday function can be an abstract, and thus confusing, process. Find more information on the best ways to go about doing it, in Webmonkey's "Crash Course in Information Architecture."

Once you have decided which stuff is the most important, and how everything is interrelated, the structure of the site will appear naturally. Now you're ready to bring all this pencil-and-paper work to the digital realm.

When building a site from scratch, I tend to make a bunch of dummy pages first, naming them and grouping them into directories. This gives me an overall idea of how the site will be organized before starting on the actual code.

While your site is small and manageable, it may make sense to put all your image and HTML files in the same directory as the index page. Once your site begins to grow (which usually happens at mach-speed), things will get awfully crowded and confusing if you keep everything in the same directory. It's pretty standard these days to file your images and media files in their own folder to keep them separate from the HTML stuff. This sort of back-end architecture is primarily for your use (and your colleagues' use, if necessary), so set it up in a way that makes sense to you.

Keep in mind, of course, that your visitors will be viewing and dealing with your URLs — make sure they're as manageable and memorable as possible. (In most cases you'll want keep the profanity to a minimum.) Another site-building convention is to set up directories that echo the navigational areas of your site (e.g., "companyinfo," "products," "news"). For more information on setting up your directories in a sane manner, check out "Organizing Your Site."

Being thoughtful about your site's architecture won't guarantee relentless traffic, but it will help you come up with an effective design and create an environment in which your visitors will feel comfortable — two desirable attributes.

HINTS, POINTERS, and TIPS o' the TRADE

Once you've built your site, put a page counter on your page with Tripod's Homepage Studio tools using either a Page Counter or Tripod Stats. Take a look at your traffic logs to see if you can notice any interesting patterns. Where are people going in your site, and more importantly, where aren't they going? Perhaps there's a poorly named link that's tripping up your users. Maybe the low-trafficked area is buried too deeply? It could be time to revamp your architecture to make sure all the branches of your site are getting the circulation they need and deserve.

At 3 a.m., the time when most site building occurs, you may be tempted to redesign your entire site with that "revolutionary new navigation scheme." You may think, in the darkest hours before dawn, that replacing your normal, understandable site (featuring areas like "about me," "links," and "resume") with a yin-yang-influenced site (where everything is divided into either a "positive" or a "negative" area) is a great idea. But it isn't. Put down the mouse and go to sleep. You'll thank yourself in the morning.

RESOURCES:

Squishy's Crash Course in Information Architecture

Marketing Research on the Web

The Foundations of Web Design

Organizing Your Site

Ecological Design Moves Online