Like at least some others in the course I am having difficulty posting to my course blog regularly, not to mention the other blogs that I have going.
Anyway, I have been reading the website designs for this course, and they are mostly pretty good. At ther rate I am going, however, I probably won't finish the feedback until Monday.
As one might expect from my backgroun and interests in instructional design and related topics, I do believe in doing some design work before jumping in to build a site. For me that is especially true if your goal is to actually accomplish things with a site. If all you want to do is show off the pictures of your cats, then maybe design isn't very important, but with education and training we usually have goals in mind, and it is helpful to thing and plan about how the site will help attain them.
There is another approach to website design that can be relevant, however, which is rapid prototyping. In this approach one jumps right nto making the site, getsversion 0.1 up quickly, tries it out with people, and then goes into a loop of revisions and tryouts. This is possible nowadays on the Web because the Web is so flexible and the tools to build sites so easy. And almost everyone, even when they have planned and designed first, follow it to some extent. No one expects the design to show exactly what the final site will be. There are always changes that take place along the qay.
