When it comes time to put together your website, and your are going through your Dreamweaver Tutorials, here are some tips that you can use when it comes to having a nice balance of graphics, text, video, social media, etc. when planning your site.

Tip #1 – Plan your site first – This may sound completely obvious, but most people skip it. In other words, what are you truly wanting to share on your site? What are the main pages/topics going to be about? How do you plan to grow your site on an ongoing basis? Just get out a piece of paper and write down the main topic or niche of your site. Under that, write the 3 – 10 different main sub-topics. These will be the main pages of your site.

Tip #2 – Planning for growth – This is the second step before design. You now have the main topic/niche, and then 3-10 subtopics or pages. Now, each of those subtopics is probably going to have a few pages coming off of it as sub-subtopics. This is the growth of your site. You will be adding to your site by building pages off of your sub-topic pages. These are like “support” pages that provide depth to your site.

Tip #3 – Site layout. You need to consider a design that supports this kind of layout. It’s like a heirarchy of pages. Do you want the navigation menu on the top, left or right side? How wide do you want your site? 720-1000 pixels is about norm these days. Will your site have columns or tables? I hope so. It helps organize your information so it doesn’t look like someone threw up on your web page.  Sketch out on paper the layout. When in doubt, go to the top websites on the internet and see how they look.

Tip #4 – Put together some color schemes. Don’t go crazy here. You want color schemes with colors that work together. Again, you are not going for a design that looks like someone threw up on your page. One cool trick is to go down to a hardware/paint store and look at all the color swatches and see how those colors blend and work together. They pay people thousands of dollars to coordinate those colors. You can benefit from their work. That’s probably the best advice on this whole page.

Tip #5 – You need a balance of graphics, text, video, social media, etc. – The reason I said balance is that you need to build a site that is first of all for human visitors. Humans like content, pictures, video, etc. That is what keeps them on your site and not hitting the back button too quickly. However, you also want to build a site that is friendly to the search engines so they can index your site, so that people can find it when they search in Google. Google cannot read video, graphics, animation, flash, etc. If your site is only graphics, Google will not be able to read it. You need to have a decent amount of text as well so that Google can know what your site is all about. Like anything, you need balance. All text is boring, boring, boring. Too much graphics, animation, and jumping monkeys on your site can be turn off as well.

Just understand, you are not creating the first ever website. It may be your first ever website using a Dreamweaver Tutorial, but you’re really not creating something brand new that’s never been done before.  Go and study some other sites that you like, take bits and pieces of their ideas to help create your own. Web Design, especially with Dreamweaver, is fun and rewarding. It’s even more rewarding when you follow some of these tips and you build something that gets ranked well and great reviews from your visitors.