Your audience consists of two very different groups: first-time readers (who may be potential members) and current members. The former want information about who you are, where you are, what you do. The latter want up-to-date information about next Sunday's program, next month's bike trip, and so forth. It is natural to design your page with the first group in mind, but the real payoff in effective electronic communications comes when your current membership learns to use the web site routinely as the primary source of current information. It is important to organize your pages so that both groups can find the appropriate information fast without having to wade through items of little interest to them.
The index page. In particular, it is very important that your first page load fast. (This is called the "index" page, and it is usually named "index.html".) This page is how everyone will enter your site, and you don't want to keep people waiting. Keep it short, with no graphics or small images that download quickly, and provide carefully named links to other pages where the bulk of the information lies. This allows people to navigate through the page quickly to get where they want to go. (Whence "index".)
Avoid two common mistakes: (1) Don't pile all of your information into one long page. It will take forever to download, discouraging anybody from using the page more than about once, if that. In general, no page should contain much more than a screenfull of information unless there is a compelling reason to have the information in one page. (2) Don't put your big fancy graphics (like the full-screen drawing of your building, or the group shot you made real big so everybody could be seen) on the first page. Again, it takes these graphics a long time to download, and the experienced users don't want to wade through them just to check the time of that next meeting.
You should experiment with background colors beyond the standard gray (lighter ones being better), and with background patterns, which can significantly enhance the appearance of your page. But there are lots of bad backgrounds out there. Anything making the text at all hard to read should be avoided. (And some backgrounds make life really difficult for color-blind users.) Get feedback before choosing one.
You should always call your first page "index.html" because that is the name the Internet host looks for when it gets a URL specifying your directory but no file name. This means you can use the directory name alone as the URL (e.g., "http://www.unitarian.org/pstar" instead of, say, "http://www.unitarian.org/pstar/firstpage.html"). It also keeps outsiders from prowling your site; if there is no "index.html" the webpage server on the host will helpfully provide a list of all the files in the directory requested--but you may not want the world at large to know everything that's there.
Graphics. Use graphics sparingly. They eat up space in your allotted quota on the host, and they eat up time during download. Many serious users of the Web routinely browse with graphics turned off, precisely because graphics take time to download. Accordingly, for each <img> command in your HTML, include an "alt=" parameter that gives a brief description of the image and its size in kilobytes (KB), so the user has some idea whether it's worth downloading.
It is very common, especially in commercial webpages, to use graphics as the principal items of display, i.e., putting all or most of the content (even the text) into images. This is a serious misuse of the Internet's resources, and one of the main reasons behind the traffic jam currently developing on the net. One UU site (a UUA "site of the month" no less) paves the screen with six or seven rows of "buttons" (just links, really), each with its own separate image file consisting of a single phrase on a wood-grained background. Download cost: astronomical. Flashy, yes. Effective, no.
The colophon. It is usual to have a block of information at the bottom of each page giving links to key pages in your collection, and some information about the page itself. We recommend that the following items always be included: