Understanding roles of these bits of hardware and nature of network to be built takes you a long way in deigning ideal computer network.

Understanding implementation of network protocol and services design also contributes to a good computer network design. You can use other area networks besides LANs and WANs. A good knowledge about different forms of area networks and their roles in network designing throws up better ideas for framework.

However, two significant elements influencing network designing are bandwidth and latency supported by a network.

Bandwidth in computer networking means rate at which data can travel through a network connection or interface. It is usually expressed in bytes per second (bps). Bandwidth, however, is just one element that dictates speed of a network. Latency, other important element of speed refers to delays in processing different types of network data. Usually, tools such as ping and trace-route assess latency by determining time taken by a network packet to travel from source to destination and back.

Once you have planned budget and various factors influencing a network design, you can think about various template designs. You can think of a symmetric computer network, where all devices can transmit and receive data at equal rates, or an asymmetric one which can supports different proportion of data or bandwidth in different direction.