Header

The header has a simple job, to remind the user what site they are at. It normally contains the title of the site. If some one had a pet care site, their header might be an off-white background, with the title Pet Care printed in black along with a picture of a dog and a cat.

Global Navigation

The sites highest level of navigation. This organizes the sites contents and pages into broad categories, which are linked to. On a simple pet care site, for example, the global navigation may consist of links entitled, Home, Dogs, Cats, About.

Local Navigation

For sections with lots of pages and content, a local navigation is used to organize it further. Using our pet site metaphor, the Dog and Cat sections might have local navigations with links to content like, Favorite Foods, and Proper Care. The About section may have a local navigation linking to the History and Contact pages.

Body

This is the meat of your sandwhich. This is the bulk. It contains the content belonging to the certain page. On our pet care sites Favorite Foods page, we will find a list of the dogs or cats favorite food.

Footer

You can have a joke site and still have a footer thats strictly business. Fact is, most sites footers are just that. In their brutest form, they may just be copyright information. The footer is the end, and normally lowest part of a site. Hence the refrence to ones foot.

This article gives a new meaning to debatable, as it is simply my take on website organization. In my website design/layout tutorials, I make refrences to these components of the site being developed, and hopefully, this has cleared things up. This topic has also been denounced becuase for many, it comes as common sense. I see this tutorial as positive reinforcement. No matter how many drop-dead effects you can render in photoshop, the basics of organization and layout can keep you from making user-friendly sites.