How To Design Your Own Website That Looks Great & Professional?

It is rather easy to design your own website today as there are plenty of tools and wizards to guide you through step-by-step. But, the question is how you can make your website looks great, professional and successful? In fact, those are just tools, but what you instruct the tools to put in to your website makes a lot of difference.
The key to make sure that your website looks professional and successful is to make sure you keep it SIMPLE and CONSISTENT throughout your entire website.

Here are some guidelines for you to design your own website successfully.

How To Use Colors:
Colors play a vital role in designing your website. This aspect is often overlooked for those who design their own website. The background color of your website, the color of your text, headlines, footer, sub-headlines and etc. can all have a great impact on your visitors, especially their first impression.
Always remember that do not use more than 4 different colors in your website. And if you are going to use a combinations of several colors, make sure that they matches and does not hurt the human eyes. As humans are all your potential visitors, make sure that the colors you use pleases their eyes. Another tip is to also use black or dark text on white or light background. It's easiest for humans to read them. Again, always be consistent. Keep in mind that if you use Blue for your headlines, then make sure that you use Blue for the rest of the pages for your headlines. Do not change to other colors as it will be confusing to the readers.

Will Animation Enhance My Website:
When you design your own website, always keep animation to the minimal and use it sparingly. Never design your website with full of animation graphics, flash and etc as it will just drag your website down. Remember that not every person has a high-speed connection modem that will easily download all the contents on your website in just a couple of seconds. For those who have slow connection, the downloading of your website will be a crawl and it will just hinder them from continuing on with your website. When the wait is too long, visitors will just close it and move on to the next website.
But, if you really need to add animation or flash in your website as enhancements, then just make sure you will have another version that your visitor can view that is non-animated or non-flash.
Here are some free animated gifs and cliparts if you need to use them.

Using Images On My Website:
Images are good as a picture always tells a thousand words. But then again, make sure that you do not clutter your website with images everywhere. Keep it to those that are necessary and use it sparingly too. To design your own website with loads of images will again slowdown the downloading of your website and hinder the visitor. Always make sure that you resize and edit your images to internet usable images. The image file size should be within 10kb-20Kb only. Do not have anything that is larger size than that as it will really load very slow and off goes your visitors. Also try using .jpg or .gif image file format as this is usually more effective to maintain a smaller file size and the vibrant colors in the image.

You Don't Need To Know HTML To Design Your Own Website:
Web design is not only for techies. Today, web design is so easy that any normal humans who knows how to use a computer can easily do it without any hassle. Many web hosting solutions offers wizards or even templates for you to just drag & drop, or choose what you want to put into the design of your website. There are many free website templates that you can download and use it for your website design. Some even comes together with the whole theme. So, if you are thinking of hiring a web designer, then think again. It's much more cost effective to design it yourself.
Once you are familiar with the wizards and templates, you can slowly move into learning some Simple HTML Coding to design your own website.


Here are some additional Web Design Tips & Tricks To Help You Design Your Own Website better.