a Good Design? Organizing the Layout Designing the Navigation Taking Measurements Choosing a Layout Strategy     The logic of your site is in decent shape. You've divided the content into categories and subcategories. Now you want to think about how you're going to present your content. What's your web site going to look like? And does it really matter? Uh, oh, you've done it now. You just posed one of the Big Onesthe existential questions of web design. Every web builder has to ask them eventually. There's no going back, and you're on a tight schedule, so this chapter directs you to some practical answers.           4.1. What Makes a Good Design? Does web design matter? The answer to this one is a resounding yes. The way that you present your content is as important as the content itself. Imagine that you've written the greatest novel of all time, but your publisher puts it out on plastic sandwich wrap instead of paper, or uses pages three feet wide with miniscule type, or prints the text in reverse so that you need a mirror to read it. After your first few royalty statements, you may come to realize that appearances count. At the same time, the content has to be the star of the show. People visit your site for the information that it provides, not for the artistic innovation of your graphic design. Web design is more like architecture than painting, in that the end result has to be functional. Doorways have to be tall enough so that humans can walk through them. Floors have to support a certain minimum load, or furniture will fall through them. You, the architect, have to account for certain physical realities in your design. If this limits your creativity, then so be it. Web design, like architecture, isn't hardcore outside-the-box thinking. The box can only change so much before it loses its function. Therefore, the creative aspect of web design isn't about exploding the box, inverting it, or rendering all its perspectives simultaneously. Rather, given a box, how cleverly do you arrange its contents? Going back to your problems with your publisher, you might be inclined to put the art department on a leash. Nobody is clambering for a new book format. The one that we've had for the last couple centuries works just fine. Your publisher's creativity would be better spent looking for ways to heighten the effect of your proseto complement and support itwhile maintaining the reader's ease of use.