Use web design templates and save time

First of all, there is no right or wrong in web design. And futhermore, we should not confuse web design with web development. Web design is about the look and feel of your web site, Web development refers to the ongoing work to make your web site more user-friendly, more "successful", richer on content and so on. Let me explain what I mean.

Web design is about "look and feel"

Web design comes down to deciding on a look and feel for your web site. When you have decided on the look, feel and colour scheme, you need to decide how many different types of pages you will have. All pages will share the same design but the presentation of the information will most likely not be identical on your main page vs. for example your article pages. Comparing these two pages on my site will help illustrate my point (pages will open in new windows): Website marketing and Search engine marketing works. I hope you can see that the pages are part of the same site but there are subtle differences in the layout and the presentation of information.

By designing templates for various types of pages I save myself a lot of time later on. I simply name the templates accordning to their type and refer to the appropriate template whenever I write a new page.

For a small site you may only need 2-4 different types of pages. One home page, one sitemap, one page that supports forms and maybe an article page. When I say small site I mean 25-50 pages. For smaller mini type sites I would simply use one page template throughout the site.

Helpful in managing your website

This is also very helpful if you use relative and not absolute links in your navigation menus. Save a page for each directory and always refer to that page when creating content for that directory. That way you never have to spend time checking links that point to the root or higher / lower level directories.

If this last part sounds confusing - trust me it is easy - have a look at this article about Linking your website pages.