So you would like to know the basic and most important things one should take into consideration before creating a web site ie. page size, colors, resolution etc...

Well this is my friend Edwin's opinion…

Everything depends on your target demographic (age, gender, etc.) Say your website is for a young persons group, like a club or a church youth group. You will want to create something graphically interesting, because you have to catch their attention immediately, and you would write simply and straightforward. If you were designing a corporate site, you would want to make things simple and easy to navigate, because many business people aren't well versed in the web.

So, before you go designing, research you demographics to see what to do. Also, allot of people's screens are at a resolution of 800 x 600, so you should usually make the site's width 600px or 700px, or make some things 100% wide, so they work on any monitor. But for most websites, keep it simple because gaudy websites often end up looking terrible. One last thing, if you ever have trouble finding corresponding and complimenting colors, use this nifty tool http://goldennumber.net/color.htm, it uses the golden ratio on the color spectrum, and often ends up giving you good colors.

This post gives alot of great ideas to a new designer, but I think the resolution should be looked at by a case by case basis, instead of setting a standard width of 600px or 700px.

Neal Therrien
BMK Designs

Great information. keep up the good work

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Averaging over my 7 sites 1.3% of my members have an 800x600 monitor so that bit you can ignore.

I recommend a 820px to 900px design, anything larger (1100 - won't fit on a few monitors, 100% just look way to big on large monitors) is out of fashion, for lack of a better term.

Black/Grey headers & footers followed by light, metallic greens & blues in combination with silver headings and black text are coming into fashion with the web 2.0 age.

Example: http://www.liquidweb.com, http://www.mediatemple.com, http://www.jquery.com.

jQuery brings me on to the next bit, along with a modern colour scheme the web 2.0 age brings AJAX & Special Effects. For this your best off using a javascript library. jQuery has a range of special effects; collapse, expand, shrink, grow, fade etc. It also has great AJAX handling.

If you need any more info just pm me.

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Nick - Coder/Designer