Website Design Considerations
Theme and Content
It is assumed that having got to the stage of thinking about a website that you already have an idea as to what it should contain and what the overall subject or theme will be.
Every website should have a specific theme. This will both determine and be determined by its content.
You need to look at what content you already have and consider how best it can be displayed. If there is content that has yet to be written you should still have some idea of what it will be, how much there will be of it, its hierarchical structure (if any) and so on.
It can be a great help to already have your content ready to code up but it is not essential, coding is far easier if you have already established a page layout and structure, at this early stage this is far more important. Certainly you are advised to have the content ready for a handful of the main pages so that you will have an idea as to where you are going, but not having all of the content should not hold you back, dummy content can be used to 'pad out' new pages until copy is written.
When you do come to write the content for the remaining pages you are advised to do this away from the web-environment, just write what you want to say in a text file or document and then mark it up as HTML later on. This will avoid compromising your content with page design considerations and generally speed things up.