After the orgnization of the site's content, there are still a few steps before any actual coding or design work. One of those steps is to decide to which standard(s) the page will conform. But more than that, you must on decide what audience for which they are producing the site. For example, a web designer working for an internal Microsoft page will likely only be required to design with Internet Explorer in mind. In contrast, a designer creating a page to support open source and compatibility will probably want to design with Internet Explorer, Netscape 4.x, the Gecko-engine family (Netscape 6+, Mozilla, etc.), and Opera in mind. As well as browser, the designer also has to keep in mind the operating system. A site designed for Windows browsers could (and much of the time, does) look significantly different on a Mac operating system. And lastly, users' connection speed will play a big role in how complex a site can be before it becomes a hassle. Specifically, someone on a 28.8Kbps modem will probably not want to visit a page with large images and long pages - it will take forever to download for them. However, someone visiting an internal-network page on an Ethernet probably wouldn't be able to tell much difference between a page 5K in size with one 500k in size.

To decide on which of the multitude of standards, you should first consult the user base you are targeting. This may require a simple question to the client, or a quick user study on a similar site, or, if you are redesigning an existing site, you could parse and view the usage logs of the current site. This kind of information can be immensely useful by showing which browsers and operating systems users are using when they visit the site.

Another type of standard on which a decision must be made is the standard of code to be used on the site. The site could comform to HTML 1.x, or XHTML 1.0, or even XML 1.0 to name a few. These standards will describe your limitations on code practices as well as present many different opportunities.

The best place for more information about these standards is the W3 Consortium: an organization whose goal is to standardize web page design across all platforms and browsers. Their page is located at http://www.w3c.org/.