You may not have a clear vision of what your website will look like right now, but you need to have a clear vision of what you mean to achieve with it. Your purpose can dramatically impact your design, so best make up your mind about what your goal is.
Depending on your goals, you might be able to afford skimping on the design. Here's why: if the primary goal for your site is to display information that no one else has, information that people really want or need, then your audience is going to visit your site no matter what. That said, please try to make your site as easy view, anyhow. Conversely, if you want viewers to want to visit your site, you need to give a lot of thought to design and content.
Don't forget, along every step of the way you need to think about what your audience likes and what their limitations are, provided you don't have a captive audience, because if you do, don't worry about it. Otherwise you should consider some of the following:
Let's think about how you want your information laid out on your pages.