How do you design a layout for your website?

[Shicky]

Im used to tweaking from templates I find as Im weak at this sort of thing. However I have to do a radio station website and want to design it from scratch. I have a prototype built with the basic PHP functionality I want, now I wish to create the actual look of the website.

I have a very basic design drawn but am a little unsure how to implement other than CSS/HTML trial an error. Any other way to do this?

 

[Shicky]

Thanks i'd never even heard of wireframing at all. Any kits you can recommend?

*Its for my final year project so clear design like this will look great

 

[Shicky]

Thanks very much guys that mockingbird wireframing kit is pretty cool. Moving onto doing it in photoshop now...I've never done this before, any tips? Plan to exhaust google/youtube starting from now so any lesser known facts would be very welcome.

With regard to colour scheme could you recommend anything to see what will 'work' or is this essentially what is done in photoshop using shapes and filling?

Im a bit concerned with doing logo's in this, I have one I ripped from the old website but its going to require heavy cutting/magic wanding to fix it to the main part I want, any quick tips for this?

Finally im really worried about developing so the site appears correctly on all resolutions. My own lappy is 1280x800 which obviously raises concerns about how it would look on a standard monitor. The plan is to develop to 800x600, then hopefully have what looks like a raised page in the centre, the background would then increase/decrease based on the user resolution. Is the way around this using a repeating background and percentages to align images correctly for example?

Thanks