Share us your designing process/plan.

[skeptical]

Alright, fellow webdesigners, share with us how you start planning your website design and maybe some tips, technique, whatever. Do you just start with a blank page on some WYSIWYG or html editor and start messsing around there? Do you first draw your website design on paper and pencil as a pre-design? How are you guys planning and makking your website? Or do you simply have designer block? heh.

For me, I get on Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks and start drawing my whole layout and then make the grahpics there. I sliced up the images and then go on Dreamweaver, do an image trace, and make the html(tables, layer,frames,etc) layout. And woola! -- a complete layout design for my site.

How about you guys?

[Mikki00]

I'm a free designer. I do not make a sketch of what I'm going to do. Just started it out with misc. parts and putting them together. Best concept ever. Abstract. :D

[Dusty]

I usually have the design pretty much worked out in my mind before I start to do anything. I'll draw it in PSP and figure out where the images need slicing, meanwhile mentally developing the tables for them. Then I'll make a template page with the graphics and basic HTML to see how it looks and compare it to what I had envisioned. If it doesn't match, I'll scrap it and start over. If it does, I'll build the rest of the site off that template. When it's all done I might ask for advice or a critical review, but I never listen to what anyone has to say as I've already made up my mind whether I like it or not :D.

[Theo]

I use several techniques depending on the size of the site and the time I have.
I also use the way that skeptical and Dusty uses. Its very usful.
Something that I find useful also, especially when I have limited time is 100% Flash site. This is like designing in PSP or Fireworks, but when you finish your layout - its ready !! you do not need to slice it and figure out the tables, you don't need to worry about screen resolution (it resizes itself), you don't have to mess with Javascript - Actionscript can do it from within Flash (for most things), you don't need to worry about browser compatibility as long as the user has the plug-in your site will uppear as it should, you can use whatever font you want, you can design all pages at once, and the total size of your site will be much smaller because you are using vector graphics (remember, I am talking about a Flash site that will look like a normal HTML site, not animation) etc etc. Of course there are some negatives also. But as I said, this way, is WAY faster. (in my opinion)

[gyrbo]

I make a drawing in pencil first. Then I draw everything in PSP, and slice it up. After that comes dreamweaver to do all the design.
Once done, I open up PHP coder to make all the PHP stuff.

[crj]

i steal everything from other people....
then i mix them together and it looks like mine!! ha ha ha!! mine!!
ha ha ha!! all mine!!