The first stage of a web design project is developing the concept. Its here at the beginning of the project that you have to answer some essential questions: Why is this website needed? Who will it need to communicate with? How can the communication be achieved most effectively? What do you want visitors to the site to take away with them? And when should the Website is done? Is this the time to embark on a big interactive project, or will it take awhile for you or the client to gather the necessary resources or personnel? Once you've answered these questions. You will be well on your way to arriving at a focused solution.

In identifying the need, it's important to be as specific as possible about what your target is, and to define it in a way that will let you assess whether your best shot is producing a hit or a miss. You may think sales should go up 10% within a month. Or the average wait time in the customer service telephone queue should be cut by a fourth, or “x” amount of widgets should be cleared out of the warehouse this quarter. The better you'll be at developing a solution that works, and recognizing when it doesn't work.

A third contributor to the flavor of your web site's interface design is its style-its layout graphics, typefaces, colors and so on. The layout of the site needs to be flexible enough to support changing content and different media types. This requires an underlying grid that at least defines areas for site of company identification, navigation elements, text and imagery. In addition, alignment within the areas should be consistent. For instance, don't center some elements but align others left. Even beyond the basic grid, always look for ways to align, and thus relate, elements to one another.
One way to characterize an interface is by the dimensionality of its graphics: 2D,”2 ½ D” or 3D. The 2D style is similar to the printed page with its emphasis on a structures organization of the text and graphics on a flat surface. An example of the 2 ½ D style is the beveled button, a navigation element that appears raised and clickable. Using this approach you can easily make it clear which parts of the interface are interactive. The 3D style defines a virtual thee-dimensional space , where images of real-world environments and objects are used for navigation and information access.

Typically, dimensionality is closely tied with the metaphor used for the site. For instance, a newspaper or magazine metaphor is best represented in a 2D style. A 2 ½ D style work well for an instrument panel or appliance metaphor. A 3D style can involve anything from illustrations that fake perspective to a render-on-the-fly virtual reality (VRML) representation that lets the visitor more freely through a complex environment. But metaphor and style don't have to match perfectly. For instance, a three-dimensional metaphor such as a house can also be presented in a 2D graphical style, as a blueprint or cross-sectional drawing showing different rooms.

When you organize the information in a website, you'll feel the tension between to make lots of options available on the surface so visitors don't have to do a lot of digging (a shallow site), and wanting to give visitors a head start on sorting out what's important, by prioritizing the information so that specific topics are layered beneath general categories (a deep site). In general, there should be no more choices than that creates confusion, so you don't want the site to be excessively shallow. On the other hand, visitors should be able to get to any point within the site in two complex or seemingly simple the site, a map, directory, or navigate-by-menu section is an essential resource that provides as overview of the entire site and allows the visitor to move around comfortably and feel in control.