New Project - creating the pages..

Ground-work done, let's get busy
At this stage we have the building blocks and we need to put them all together as a page or a small site. At this stage I am thinking about a logo, colours, fonts and CSS along with navigation and how the information will be arranged on the site.
We can only discuss general terms here because some will code their own sites, the slightly less able ones (such as myself) will opt for a package like Dreamweaver... Either way layout is fairly important if you are not going to create a 'google-whore' type of layout. My style is what I like to think as organic, even if I am trying to push the site purely for Adsense. If you were looking for a quick-fix adsense-oriented site I believe such things are available 'off the shelf' - try eBay...

For my new project I used Google images to search for a generic picture related to my niche, I then set about customising the image for my own purposes, filtering to give a colour-wash effect, then emblazoning some text over the top - this will be the eye-catching image at the top of my page, my colour scheme will be related to this image. I will use a text header and ensure that I have included title and description tags before deciding where my text is going to be, where I am going to have my navigation and where I am going to place my Adsense, or other advertising.
This is largely a question of personal preference combined with received wisdom regarding adsense positioning. Many folks prefer to place adsense right in the middle of paragraphs rather than have a glaringly obvious adsense side-banner. There are no rights or wrongs, but you may find that you get better results from one position compared with another. I am fond of the small block of 4 or 5 text-links that Google offer, but you will need to get a further click on the results of the first click before you earn anything from them. They look like they might be supplementary site navigation, so could easily be clicked almost unintentionally.
For this site, I will probably use one tall side banner and two horizontal banners in the spaces between paragraphs - this tends to be my default layout - Google resricts pages to displaying three adsense blocks, so choose them carefully.
For supplementary revenue generation I think I will look into adding links to eBay (I tried one of these services before, but they were useless) as the subject of my niche is tied closely to buying on eBay.
That's more or less where I am to date, I have a logo and a rough layout plan and have a Dreamweaver page started. I am looking for my content and need to edit and arrange it into a sensible collection of information - after that I will be placing some links in order to have the page(s) indexed by Google - I will post an update when I have reached the next stage, and we will look at some of the simple onsite and offsite SEO that every webmaster at every level should be incorporating into their sites.