Web site design begin with building or selecting a template that will hold the site elements. the template can be thougth as the cover that will hold the site components. the template can be designed by the person who wish building the site it can be bought and selected from web company. it can be selected also for free from free sites.
Once the template is selected, the web elements on the page must be determined and designed if necessary. the web page elements are like the buttons that the user clicks it, the images that will be put on the web page to make sense to the user what the page is about, the videos that will be put on the page, the advertisment on the page, if exists.
The web page elements must be determined and designed apart from each other. once ther are designed, the web designer is ready to place them on the webpage. the process of determining the web elements to be placed on the page and how to place them is called the layout of the page. it will affect how the page will look.
Many programs exists that can help to create or modify the layout of the web page. the most common is dreamwaver and frontpage extension. the designer can edit the page using the HTML directly but these prgrams will help when there are much work with the web pages or when designing them the first time.
When designing the web site, many issues must be considered from the point of view of the search engines. basically, the meta tags must be defined on each page. also the site must be designed with proper architecture to help people and search engines to know easily the layout of the site.