You may have some wonderful, creative and rule breaking ideas swimming around in your head as to how you want your website to look. But, before you start laying out your site in photoshop, you need to determine, if in fact, these ideas make good design sense.

Although the web is filled with endless possibilities of different layouts, only a few of those work. I will start with the first and foremost: Left Column Navigation, and continue with the remaining over the next few posts.

1)Left Column Navigation – a classic. This is a site where main content sits below the header, and the left column is narrow (25% or so) and the right content is wide (75%) The navigation is not necessarily inside the left column, it can be just below or above the header, spanning the entire page. This layout is kind of like your favorite pj’s. It is comfortable and well used. This layout is a safe bet for almost any project. Unfortunately, since this layout is so popular, and been done so many times, it tends look unoriginal.

Here are a couple of examples of Left Column Navigation:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/

http://www.bluefur.com/aboutus/

http://www.rainbow.ca/