Occasionally you'll need to whack out a project or page quickly and without a lot of prior planning, but whenever you are undertaking a major project you'll achieve better results by determining various things about your plans before beginning work.
What is your content?
Identify the material that you want to put on the web before you begin. Decide what
is most important. You should give that material priviledged placement in your design.
Think about the order in which you want viewers to see your content. Think about natural ways to arrange your content. Do you want viewers to bop around according to their own whim, or do you have definate ideas about the order in which your materials are seen? Generally the latter is the case, and so you should plan out the way that you want documents to link to one another.
Who is your audience?
We often hope that as many people as possible will view our web pages. Maximizing "hits" is in
the minds of all web authors. But some visitors will be more important to you than others, and
you need to decide in advance who is your target audience. Making this decision in advance,
even if you change your target as time passes, will help you make crucial design decisions.
Are you trying to reach multimedia producers? If so, you can fairly assume that your target audience will be using high-end computers with the latest browsers and plugins. This type of user has a higher standard of web design, a greater interest in the latest technologies, and a very short attention span.
Are you trying to reach folks who are new to the Internet? If so, you might consider the fact that these people may be reaching your web pages through a less-capable browser such as AOLs'. You should be very careful about using technologies which aren't visible to less whizzy browsers.
Are you trying to reach users who access the Internet via a modem, or via a high-speed ethernet connection. This is one of the most crucial questions, as you must be very careful about the size of the files you include in your web site. Using media economically is one of the most crucial aspects of web design. If, however, you know the conditions under which your pages will be viewed you can allow yourself the luxury of slightly larger file sizes.
What is your design specificiation?
Design specification is a fancy way of saying that you have established conventions for
your web pages before you begin authoring.
What size monitor do you anticipate that most of your users will have? What resolution do you think people will have their monitors set to? Just because you don't mind looking at tiny text doesn't mean that your audience will feel the same. You should decide on a screen resolution at the beginning of your process, set your monitor to that resolution, take a screen shot and open the resulting image in Photoshop. Measure the space you have at your disposal. In order to avoid users having to scroll unnecessarily you can plan your site to conform to a specific width and/or height. Similarly, you can plan the type of graphics that you will include according to whether you anticipate that your users will have 8 bit monitors or higher.
Take a guess about the amount of RAM that your users will have installed on their computers. If you think it is a low number like 8 or 16 or 32MB, you should avoid using high-end plugins like Flash.
Some technologies such as Java, Javascript, and ActiveX work better with some browsers than others. Generally speaking, Java works better on the PC than the Mac. Similarly, some HTML tags only work in specific browsers, or specific versions of browsers. Be careful about using specialized tags unless you know that your audience will be standardized on a particular version of a browser.
All of these choices are somewhat speculative and you should be prepared to adjust your settings based on user testing and feedback from actual members of your audience.