Planning Your Website Layout: Building solid foundations

Organising site structure is vital so that:

 

• Customers can find their way around intuitively
• Search engines can find all of your content
• Updating pages and developing the whole site is easier

 

There are many elements to good website design such as colour, style of font, images and content.

 

However before you get to the visual elements of developing the website we should develop strong foundations by considering how the website is organised.

 

Develop the layout of your site

 

Imagine you’re designing that hotel.

Lets take a virtual tour through the hotel.

 

You enter the property by the main door and stand in the reception.

 

Where will you go next?

 

There could be many different spaces that you might be able to go to from here – dining rooms, bars, event rooms, the kitchen, public toilets, bedrooms, utility rooms, entertainment rooms, gardens, gym etc.

 

Now not all hotels have the same number or variety of rooms but all the rooms should have a purpose no matter how small or large the hotel.

 

In your boutique hotel your reception area might lead to:

• An upmarket bar
• A swish restaurant
• A spa
• Sumptuous lounge areas
• The hotel bedrooms

 

In our hotel analogy the different spaces of the boutique hotel could equate to the different sections on your website.

 

Take a piece of paper and start to map out the different sections of your website.

 

Your design may look a little like this:

 

 

What about different things within each section?

The boutique hotel has a very individual style.

In fact each bedroom is uniquely interior designed around a specific style:

• Rock/Pop
• Futuristic
• Pink Candy
• Rococo
• Black Velvet

And some of our rooms have special facilities:

• Four poster beds
• Gondola beds
• Water beds
• Circular beds
• Spa baths
• En suite lounges

 

So in the hotel brochure we might have a special page devoted to each of our rooms.

Now let's apply that to your website plan you have just drawn.

 

 

A customer walking into the hotel needs to identify with the space:

• Feel that the hotel is what they expected it to be
• Understand how to get where they want to go
• Have the facilities that they were looking for

 

When you plan your website layout think like you’re planning a hotel.

 

Read about the next stage in planning a website 'Navigation and clearly defining what the page is about'

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