STORYBOARD your site -
In general, it's a good idea to think about the content and structure of your site a bit before you begin creating pages willy-nilly (I speak from experience, having created a good many pages willy-nilly and have later regretted it). This sort of pre-planning is something you can have your students do (as homework or in the lab), as all that's needed is a pencil and paper.
You can make this a quick, simple exercise, or a more formal extended discussion depending upon how much emphasis you want to put on the planning process. For example, you might ask students to come up with more than one design for the site structure, or you might ask students to discuss the similarities/difference between planning a web site and planning a paper or other kind of communicative document.
Pre-planning will help your students determine what kind of navigation will make the most sense for their site. Here are a couple of diagrams I made in thinking about how I might design my own portfolio if I were taking the prosem this semester:
As part of this pre-planning discussion, you might have students look online and see how many different navigation schemes they can find. Some sites have traditional lists of links in top or left-hand menus, other sites integrate their navigation into more of an image-focused or conceptual scheme. You can talk about when and whether different approaches seem more or less appropriate, and how design conventions and user experience/expections affect the usability of various navigation schemes.
LOOK & FEEL: think about it
You can also have your students do some research as part of their planning process. Have them cruise the web for sites whose look and feel they especially like (or dislike). In discussion and/or some sort of journal/Bb entry, get them to try to articulate what it is that attracts them to particular sites (or not). You may want to model this in advance, showing them how to say more than just "it's cool" or "it's ugly."
