Layout and Design
The overall layout of your site is one of the most important aspects to consider. While there is no shortage of room for creative flexibility, it is definitely one of the first things that needs to be considered in the design process. The location of key images, order and position of navigation links, and at least some degree of fluid design are key parts of the foundation for your site.
All of these parts need to work well together from the very beginning so it's important to make decisions early that you can stick to. One commonly made bad choice is to create a fixed-width site. It might look great on the designer's screen but people these days are using a much wider variety of screen resolutions, and not everyone wants to browse in a fullscreen window. It's very simple to design a site that will work nicely with multiple window sizes without creating annoying things like horizontal scrollbars, images or links that may never be seen, etc. It's also simple to create a site that doesn't turn into a tiny thing in the upper left corner of a large monitor.
Making sure your navigation menus are clear, easy to move through, and function properly for everyone is vital. It's where reliance on automated design tools fails so often. The designer becomes a slave to a tool because she or he doesn't know how to figure out that 2 + 2 = 4 without the calculator. Dropdown type menus are really nice, but if they don't work for some people and you don't have some form of 'backup' then many visitors will never even know about a large portion of your site.
Simple logic combined with an understanding of human preferences and learned behavior is really all it takes to create an effective layout. A little attention to detail goes a long way. If you want nice fancy menus that will work for most people, it only takes a few more minutes to create an alternative that will work for everyone else.
In all of this the main underlying theme is to consistently deliver your content to visitors in the right locations and order. Looking at your design from the visitor's point of view will do a lot more for your site than shoving flashy images, giant text, or excessive punctuation in their faces. If you understand your visitors then you can know what they're going to look at first and you can give them both what they want as well as what you want them to see.
