Thinking about your site
Lets start thinking about your site. In very real terms. Pages. After all thats what sites are made of of. What sorts of pages are you going to have? Lets have a quick look at commonly found pages.

Index or home page
The centre of the known web page. The start page. Often your visitors first impression of your site. You have about 5 seconds to make an impact. Or at least enough impact not to instantly turn your visitor away. A recent trend of having horrid splash pages has not been fully stamped on yet. Flash is a lovely invention - and some splash pages are really nice. But, as you've gathered, I'm not very keen on them. Maybe if you're selling your services as a flash designer, then go for it. Other wise, leave well alone. On your front page you should make it clear what your site is about. (Don't reply on people being able to guess from your domain name.) Use words to tell people what its about. You will be rewarded when the search engine's spiders come a searching. You should aim to have a couple of hundred words on your intro page - relevant to your site of course.

Content Pages
Inside content pages. These should follow a very similar layout to your main page. So consider this when you're thinking about your front page. How easily can you adapt it to be a content page? You don't want your visitors to think they've wondered off site. Keep styles consistent.

Other Pages
Your guestbook, forum and other pages should follow colour schemes laid out in your other pages. If you can't customise something then ask someone to help you!

Depth of Site
Depending on your site you'll need to think about navigation - and whether you can link to every page on every page. Making it easier to get round pages in your site will encourage people to do that.