Well hello reefgirl!! I see I'm not the only marine & pond duo on here. I have a 3000 gallon koi pond, working on putting a video together of it at the moment.
Edit: sorry just realized you asked for a site recommendation, not a novel from me lol.
Ill get you a picture tomorrow of mine, it's still a work in progress but I watched some laguna pond design DVDs before building this puppy and I found they helped a lot.
There's a lot of things you have to take into account before you start digging. For instance:
An area that gets partial shade and partial sunlight throughout the day. It depends what type of pond you're interested in (fish, plant etc) but if you want fish chances are you're also going to want to have a decent amount of plant coverage for protection. Having plants means you need some sunlight, but too much sun = algae problems.
Another thing is determine your design first, shape of the pond how deep how wide/long, gallons... You want to incorporate many shelves to put plants on. I thought I made enough in mine and im kicking myself for not making more shelves.
Also plan where you would like to have a waterfall, and then you have to consider that the skimmer should be as far from the waterfall as possible (maximum filtration/water movement).
Whatever you do, don't buy anything until your entire pond is finished being dug, shelves put in and all. (when I say shelves I just mean digging them). Once you're happy with the design then you should buy your skimmer, filter/falls, pond liner, felt underlay or whatever you choose to go with all at once. I say all at once because you want to build/landscape your waterfall into the pond liner to be sure that no water is being lost anywhere. And you also want to attach your skimmer to the waterfall at this time aswell.
As I think of more I'll add them to this thread. Im sure there's lots more I'm just too tired to brainstorm.
Ill get you that pic tomorrow
