What recommendations would you offer on page design?

Simplicity.

Remember that your pages will appear differently according to the Web browser and screen resolution that your visitors are using. It is wise to keep your pages as simple as possible. A second advantage of simplicity is that your pages will download relatively quickly. Over elaborating is a mistake.

It is the task of Web designers to optimize each Web design for high Search Engine ranking (See Bells and Whistles).

Page length.

You should keep your page length short. Be prepared to cut long documents into a series of shorter pages with simple links backwards and forwards. Try to avoid pages that are more than four-screen-heights. When pages have more than a screenful of information, users spend much more time on the top of the page and less time on the remaining screen of information. Research emphasizes that there is an 80-20 split, with 80% of time spent on the first screenful and the remaining 20% on the rest of the page. -  http://www.usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines.html

Templates

For the Web page design, you can develop or acquire template pages and almost at the end, copy and paste the content when you are confident that the templates are appropriate. During the Web site development, copy a few key pages onto the templates and place them on your Web server. If you will have just a few pages then it really does not matter but if you will have a hundred or more, then reformatting the Web page each time you need to make an alteration becomes a major chore.

Advantages of waiting to transfer to Web page.

• Keep three or four fonts as styles.
• Uniformity as long as you keep in same document.
• Easier to move sections about a word processor document than between pages.