What should I look for in first place when starting a design?

I want some advice in the design layout structure of a e-commerce site and how to distribute the ads.

Look into some user testing. No matter what you do you don’t know if your information architecture will be good until it gets in front with your users.

Everything depends a lot on what your target audience will be. There are plenty of inspirational sites around. Have a look, some of them are quite refreshing

http://abduzeedo.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://sixrevisions.com

To name just a couple

I got a book called The Web Designers Idea Book from amazon, it’s only a few quid and very good.

Whether it’s for selling Porsches or posting your sonnets to your cat, a site stands and falls on its functional and elegant design. Your first consideration should be to make a well-designed, visually appealing, and highly functional site, period. Then you can get about the business of crafting it to sell Porsches or pork rinds or whatever you’ve got going on.

Your best resource for ideas is google. Just start researching e-commerce websites in relation to your website. See where they are putting their ads and decided if maybe you should place in similar area. Ad placement is very important because it can be the difference from 3 to 30 clicks if its in the right spot. Look around and see what everyone else seems to be doing.

I would suggest that you would determine your target market first. From here on, you can slowly develop your site’s design in order to accommodate their tastes.