Want to learn how to start your own web design business, from learning web design to managing finances and getting clients? Check out my online course: http://bit.ly/web-design-course When a person first lands on your page, they will likely look at the page in a triangle pattern. Meaning they look first at the top left corner, then the top right corner area, then the center of the page a little ways down (think about how you look around when you log into Facebook). Most designers cater to this by putting the company logo top left, navigation top right or somewhere close, and content is obviously centered farther down the page. Next, in terms of content, users will immediately be looking for visual hierarchy. This means that each piece of information presented should generally ‘nest’ within a box around it composed of slightly less specific content that encapsulates that topic. In terms of a website, you usually have the site logo and navigation at the edges of the page - the most generalized ‘box’ containing content. After that, you have things like sidebars, secondary navigations, and featured content. After that, you have article or page headings. Within that you have the main content. Each of these progressively gets more specific until you get to the main content of the page, whatever is supposed to motivate a user to action or inform them about something. This works because our brains are programmed to process information in progressively more granular sections and bits. We naturally organize information into hierarchies. If you break that hierarchy, people will be very confused - imaging having to read through half of a blog post before you saw what the title of the article was. Whatever the purpose of a page is, that purpose should be fulfilled somewhere in the center of the page. You quite literally want it to be the center of attention, and everything else needs to be tastefully placed to the side, available for use in the event it’s needed. Next, know right off the bat that almost no one will read or otherwise examine a page in a linear, predictable fashion. Most readers on the web will skim read, jumping from section to section, looking for the important bits they can absorb before moving on to the next piece of information or the next page. Often this is pretty much random, so your job as a web designer is to put important things in very accessible places so that they are easier to skim. This goes back to visual hierarchy - important stuff should be big, less important stuff should be smaller. If something is consistent across the website, it should be smaller since it is not going to be relevant to every single page. When it comes to the actual sections of a website’s layout, they’re pretty much consistent. In its most basic form, your website will need a: Header Navigation (often in a sidebar or in the header) Body (for containing the actual content) Footer (containing another navigation, copyright information and other misc things - not required on all pages or even all sites but it’s common to have SOMETHING there) Sidebar (for some sites, acts as a secondary type of navigation that consists of dynamic content that will change over time - like a featured blog post or a list of the most recent blog posts) A good website is a lot like a book - you want a tasteful beginning to introduce you to the the site (in this case the header and nav), the bulk of it will be in the middle where you want plenty of room for the main content, and then you want a clear ending that wraps everything up. Navigations traditionally go either in the header or the left sidebar (since in English we read left to right). Right hand sidebar navigations almost never work well. Left hand sidebar navigations can still work well, but nowadays navigations are typically in the header to avoid interfering with the content and cleaning up the layout a bit. If you decide to use a left aligned navigation, be very careful as it is very easy for this to make your site look outdated - left hand sidebars were standard in the early days of the internet and it tends to look cluttered and old. A good rule of thumb for creating an attractive but still functional and usable layout is that if you were to stand 30 paces away from your computer, you should still be able to identify: the logo the navigation where the main content resides what the encouraged action is for the page (i.e. are they supposed to read a chunk of text? Fill out a form? Click a button? It should be dead obvious - internet users are lazy) Obviously all of that is pretty much standard practice - but that does NOT mean you have to use those rules. Always feel free to experiment and try new things that others may not have thought of. That’s the only way to really innovate and find your own style. Learn the conventional way of doing things, and then unabashedly ignore it every so often.