In Step 1: Planning, you belike already got a beatific intent most what types of layouts and organisation you poverty to use. Let your creativity line here. Remember, there are multiple layouts you module belike requirement for your design. You'll poverty a layout for your homepage, which, according to your sitemap, module meet include some preceding aggregation or highlights, some links, and, depending on your goals, maybe some elating imagery.

You'll also poverty a layout for your transitional pages. Transitional pages are pages that meet shuttle the user to more important things. In the distribution sitemap above, the Music and Electronics pages are meet transitional pages. The Music tender would be small, and include links to the different genres of music beneath (Country, Hip Hop, Classical, and Rock). The Electronics tender would also be small, and meet include diminutive bits of aggregation while it links to the more important stuff, like the DVD Players, TVs, MP3 Players, and Digital Cameras pages. Transitional tender layouts should match the whole site, but also be ultimate so user's crapper pays as lowercase instance on them as possible.

You belike don't poverty to hear this, but modify at this point, you strength study leaving Photoshop closed for a bit. Instead, essay art several layouts for your site on essay first. It's a beatific intent to build multiple layouts meet to see how they "feel" with the site you're building, and using Photoshop to build lots of layouts that you strength not modify ingest is instance consuming. It's such faster to draw some quick and dirty layouts on essay to get a rough see for which way you poverty to go with the design.

By this point, you belike hit a twitchy causing finger correct most now when it comes to onset your organisation gun. But verify it slow. Here's something to study most design.

Did you know that Apple, the company behind the designs of the wildly successful iPhone, iPod, and iMac computers and Macbooks, uses a organisation process they call "10-3-1?" It's true; at the 2008 South By Southwest Interactive Festival, I attended a presentation by Michael Lopp, Apple's senior engineering manager, where he revealed this diminutive lowercase bit of aggregation to a packed room filled with designers.

Here's how it works. Apple designers staleness adhere to the 10-3-1 rule, where designers prototypal give themselves plentitude of creative immunity and come up with 10 good, wholesome designs for something. This could be for a site or a product, among other things. Then, after coming up with 10 beatific designs, they staleness go through the painful and ofttimes difficult task of eliminating 7 of them, leaving them with 3 rattling beatific designs to impact with.

Then, the Apple designer's module pays some months on these 3 designs improving them and bringing them up to Apple's game. Finally, after all this work, the designers staleness again eliminate 2 of the designs, until they're left with meet 1 powerful organisation which gets the final impact done and is given the well-known Apple brand and polish.

In recent eld this type of thinking has been very beatific to Apple, and their designs hit met with some bounteous success. If you poverty your designs to be successful as well, then it's here in this step, Step 3: Design, that you should verify the instance before opening Photoshop to rattling organisation out your design, taking into account everything you learned from Step 1 and lettered what the site module line like from Step 2.

Make sure you finalize your design. Once you hit your organisation ready, there's no going back.