Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript®

Chapter 9. Page Layout

This chapter is the first of two chapters about guiding you through the entire process of designing a site from start to finish.

There are a lot of people who have a web site simply because they think they should have one — they don't necessarily know what should be on it and for them the first reaction is often to copy other sites. So, before sketching out your first ideas of how the site might look, I am going to guide you through a process I use whenever I create a new web site. It helps the site owner understand what information should be on the site.

Having determined the content of your site, you can group the information into related chunks and create a site map. That site map shows each of the pages of your site, how they relate to each other, and what needs to appear on them.

Once you know what needs to appear on each page, then you can start to look at page layout, which involves the arrangement of the information on your pages.

Having determined what your page will look like, you need to translate your designs into code. This will involve learning how CSS can be used to control the position of content on your pages.

To wrap up the chapter we will take a look at the issues regarding developing web sites for use on mobile phones. Even if you do not think that you need to worry about users with mobile phones, you might reconsider when you find out that in some countries a fifth of Internet users access the Web via a mobile device.

This chapter is broadly ...