There are a few basic things that you should remember when designing a webpage. WebProNews talked with Founder and CEO of High Rankings and Co-Founder of SEMNE, Jill Whalen about what you should do when starting to design a page.

1. The first step is keyword research. You need to know what you want to highlight on your page for the search engines.

Whalen said, “You want to sort of figure out what pages you need on the site, based on what keyword phrases you find people are looking for. And from there, you can just put them into the navigation.”

2. Make a blueprint of what you think your site should look like. You can even use index cards for this. Simply write your ideas for categories and tabs that you want on the cards and then you can separate them into groups, etc, to create a map and layout of your page design.

3. Make sure your headings are bold and appear consistently in the same place on every page. Just like most things in the design stage, consistency could be the most important feature on your site.

So now the question arises as to what don’t I do on my site? Well the video gives more tips, but here are just a few quick things you shouldn’t be doing.

1. You should not try to put every link on every page.

2. Don’t open a new page up in a new window.

“You could design a menu that could not be found by the search engines, that can’t be seen at all by them. Certain Java Script menu’s would be pretty much invisible and so they wouldn’t know you had all those links, so you want to avoid them,” said Whalen of what not to do.

So the only thing left to do is to go ahead and start designing your site…and of course watch the video to gain more tips here on WebProNews.

And here are some previous articles that you can catch yourself up on site navigation and menus.