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When designing the site layout keep in mind the following points:

Visitors
In the majority of cases they want information and they want it now. How beautiful your site is will not be as relevant to them as long as it loads fast, has consistent layout and makes it easy to the user to evaluate its usefulness to them.

Search Engines
When you are designing the layout always ask yourself what impact anything you plan to add to your site will have on the experience of your visitors and the capacity of search engines to efficiently index your pages. Add pages in order so that navigation through the website is consistent and progressive. Further details on search engine optimization are given in the section on promoting your site.

Always add a Site Map
A site map is just a simple list of web pages on your site. It gives your visitors a quick guide to what can be found there plus it's very useful to the search engine spiders. You can also use it to keep track of your site and see its structure and content all in one place. If your website is without a Site Map, there is every possibility that some of your visitors might leave your website within 10 seconds failing to find what they were looking for.

Navigation Structure
The aim of a web site's navigation is simply to allow users to get to the content they require. For sites that have a large number of sections and web pages (and information sites can be one of these) the navigation plan has to be properly researched and designed. You have to consider different types of visitors and simulate the most common steps they would take to find what they want on your site and the navigation plan has to optimize this movement. For example the steps required from searching a catalog of items, selecting from the catalog, adding them to a shopping cart, proceeding to check out, to entering the payment particulars is a specific sequence that should be facilitated by the navigation system. If the sequence is haphazard, it could lead to frustration or the user may miss an important step and you would have an aborted sale.

To find their way about, users need to know two things:

* Where they are now 
* How to go elsewhere 

Navigation does not exist in isolation; good site organization is a prerequisite for a coherent navigation system.

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