Methods

Style

This should be the last thing to be approached, to fully benefit from content styling you need to create content without style, then apply style to it, not create content for style.

Applying style to correctly formatted mark-up (web based content) gives many benefits and leaves the site as flexible as possible for change at later dates.

Layout

Layout tends to be one of the major governors in theme design, detailing what can and can't be achieved with the agreed layout type. There are many for and against conclusions that come from any layout type, so choosing can be difficult.

A good example is floating layout structure, these adapt to screen sizes and move text to compensate. A major benefit is your page always fits the screen size with no big margins at the sides, and your page will try to adapt to any type of display whether it is a desktop computer or mobile phone. Drawbacks include creating graphics, rendering text and overall layout can all be more difficult to achieve, making the site harder to create. Your site will also look slightly different on every screen and overall cost is increased due to testing and alterations which needs to be more in depth.

Fixed layouts are easier to create as you know what size everything has to be, as well as content always appearing in the same fixed place. Other benefits include more graphically pleasing sites can be achieved due to the ease of creating images to a fixed size. Drawbacks can include big margins on high resolution monitors, limited access to mobile devices and non standard equipment.

Themes

A theme is generally the overall type of look you are trying to achieve, encompassing types of images, colour schemes and any graphical interaction between the user and the web page.

The theme can be a customised idea or can be centralised around an already present idea. Creating a custom theme to reflect the company logo or image of the business is normally the way forward for most designs.