Always start on paper so you know what you need to include in your site, so you don't get so far into the design stage and realise a whole new section needs to be included.

With the majority of sites, some pages are more complex / need to contain more / different information, so I would advise to always start coding your template to fit the most complex page, it makes work a lot easy when you only have to take elements away rather than trying to build them in afterwards.

mwdesign