I recently spent the last few days doing the redesign of my site and while I can say that I am satisfied with the site’s current look and feel, I can honestly say that I came across this design by accident and pure luck. I probably developed 3 complete Wordpress themes while I was doing the initial design, but neither of them felt right.

You might be thinking, “What does this have to do with web design?”

Well, Ill tell you. The most important part of any design is the plan before hand. When you just start coding aimlessly into the darkness, it is very easy to stray from a design that has potential because you don’t know where you are going.

Creating a beautiful website is kind of like writing a great research paper, no matter how much you know about something, you still need a plan to keep your thought strung together coherently.

There are many ways to make your design plan. I took a few from the writing process because the design process is pretty much the same.

1. Brainstorm - brainstorming is the part of the design process where you think about what you want, you don’t have to draw anything during this phase. I normally just think of the general layout and then I start to play with colors in my mind.
2. Wireframes - some designers live and die by their wire frames. I personally don’t use them just because my photographic memory allows me to draw things out in my mind and remember them, but for some people, especially artistic ones, this probably helps a lot.
3. Mock-ups - These are similar to wire frames but they are drawn in Photoshop and they are basically what the site will look like. I normally do mock-ups for graphic intensive sites.

This is just a list of the three design planning practices that I use most frequently. I am sure that there are many other different techniques out there and you can let me know in the comments if you think you have better ones.

The main point of this article is to get you to plan your moves before you make them. It normally leads to a victory in any type of game, and it definatly leads to a successful web design.