This sucks! Are you saying this to yourself every time you look at your website? Sometimes it can be rather challenging to create what you really want your website to look like. And you may not want to give away hundreds of dollars to a professional for making your website look good. Don’t despair! Here are some simple tips that can really improve your website.

• Consistency – Make sure that the design of each page is consistent with the broad theme of the site, so that all the pages look like they belong to the same site.
• Use a graphics program – Try making all changes in to your page design in a graphics program. This will take you only seconds to view what the changes look like. Using an HTML page is cumbersome and you may take hours trying to rearrange a page layout only to find out that you don’t like the change you made.
• KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid (Pardon my French!). Avoid crowding the page with too many graphics and images. The simpler your page is, the easier it is for people to absorb what it has to convey and this captures a person’s interest. Large graphics also take longer to load.
• Text readability – Keep the background textures and colors such that the text is easy to read. Avoid stretching the text right across the page. Avoid putting text in all caps. Avoid jazzy fonts.
• Easy navigation – This is very important. Position the toolbar with links across the top of the page or on the left-hand side of the page (or both). This is where people look for the links. Moreover, people should be able to identify exactly where the links will take them.
• Stay away from – (a) Revolutionary plug-ins that most visitors are unlikely to have, (b) features that are browser specific and (c) frames that scroll sideways.