It is generally thought that website design is about producing attractive, dynamic pages to grab the visitor's attention, but this is not necessarily the whole story.
The World Wide Web is jam-packed with pages of every conceivable shape, size and colour - millions of new pages appear every single day, as "web designers" rack their brains to dream up some new layout or colour scheme to make their pages stand out from the crowd.
Consider why people visit the Web. There are very few alternatives: to get information, to use services such as shopping or banking, to be entertained, to obtain free software or something similar. Possibly ninety per cent of visits start with a search engine. Most visits continue with scrolling through a large number of pages to glean a suitable and relevant resource. A disconcertingly high proportion of visits peter out in frustration under the weight of broken links, "flash intro" pages, unreadable or inaccessible colour schemes and layouts, sites devoid of real content, portals containing nothing but yet more links to other portals, and so on ad infinitum. I call these sites "noise". They clog the web, eat up our bandwidth and waste our time.
Our job as designers is to separate the "medium" from the "message", but still to use the medium in the most effective way to promote the message. There are so many tools at our disposal to manipulate page design that it is easy for sites to become "over engineered" - the message is obliterated by the technical bells and whistles of the medium. It is sometimes harder to successfully design simplicity into a site than to try to design yet another "killer" website!
Website planning
Great websites start on paper, with a main purpose and a list of objectives. Why do you want a web site exactly, and what will you do with all these blank pages in order to achieve this? (The fact that you have read this far shows that I have achieved my main purpose! Please read on.)
If there is something on your pages that is not essential to the site's main purpose it must be ruthlessly removed - it slows download times, increases bandwidth usage and obfuscates the message. Visitors have come there for a purpose - let them get at it quickly, and then give them reasons to stay a bit longer and come back often.
The visitor to your web site should be oblivious to the technology behind it. The message must be prominent and displayed with style but not confusion.