starting to think about page structure

The diagram above shows you the three distinctive design areas, which are determined by the content of a website.

First off, the image is exactly 1024 x 768, however as you can see quite a bit of this area is taken up by the browser, so you are actually left with considerably less space to work with. What you do have left needs to be thought of as three distinctive areas: 

The header is where the site's information (such as the title, subtitle and so on) go. Also some buttons, such as 'contact' or 'FAQ' or 'Home' may go here as well. Essentially this is the area that will be initially visible when someone comes to your site and so this is the place where they are most likely to see things. Next, comes the area through which someone would access the (initially hidden) content, such as pages, things grouped together as labels (categories in wordpress), also links to other sites, and so on. So, in a word, this second area is the menu. It is highly desirable that this part (along with the header, of course) stays consistently visible throughout your site. And then third, is the part of your site that changes and is updated very often - the main window, or the content.

You should be aware that these areas do not need to be placed in the way that I have put them here but can be located quite differently as well. So, as an example, a menu could be on the right side only, or it could be on both sides (as it is here on this site), or it could even be on the bottom or the top like a narrow band running underneath the header. Again, the header could be on the side or even the bottom - in which case you would of course need a special frame so that it would always slide upwards and stay visible inside the screen. What is important is that you need to be aware of these three parts and that all of them are accounted for in your design.

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