How should the site look? Each site has unique requirements: an online scientific or literary journal will have rather different constraints when compared to an e-commerce site or a user community.
It's always a good idea to keep your essential content "above the fold," or viewable without any vertical scrolling. Some sites keep all the content above the fold, though this is very different than the traditional blog format that lists many posts (or excerpts) on the homepage.
Additionally, take time to address each of the following design elements:
Colors: Pick out colors and get the hexadecimal values. For a chart of colors, see: http://www.morecrayons.com/
Image sourcing: Gather and prepare your images, resizing and saving your photos in
.jpgformat. If you need images, see the following stock photography website: http://www.sxc.hu/Fonts: What fonts will you use? Remember that users must have the font installed on their computer. For this reason, a best practice is to specify font families via CSS—a list of the fonts to be used, in the order specified, if available. Choose from the safe web fonts (which exist on all computers), specify fonts for Mac, Windows 95 to XP, or Vista. To use a non-standard web font, seeChapter 6: WP sIFR Plug-in. For help picking out your fonts, see: http://www.typetester.org/
Graphic assets: In order to customize your theme, you will need to organize and prepare graphic assets such as a logo, header, backgrounds, buttons, ads, etc. These should typically be in
.gifor.pngformat. Consider working with a graphic designer or a WordPress consultant, if necessary.Multimedia: Audio and video assets will almost always need to be resized, compressed, or exported to be optimized for the Web. Gather your source files and consider working with a Video editor, if needed.