Simple Web Design

Many of the visitors to this site, and many of the people I've dealt with, are small businesspeople, who can't afford to have custom website design done by a professional web design firm.

Their only option is the "design your own website" option. A large number of these people haven't designed a website before, and only want to do one web design project - their own site.

The idea in their head seems like the best web design concept ever, but when it finally gets onto the screen, it doesn't come out as planned, and ends up looking very amateurish.

If at first you don't succeed, stop trying so hard

The problem is that graphic web design is not an easy job, and everyone's first web design attempt is always a "learning experience." :)

A lot of websites look unprofessional because the designer has tried too hard to make the graphics look good, without knowing what they're doing. If they just hadn't tried as hard, the site would have looked a whole lot better.

A reasonable number of pages on the internet fail my "blank page test". In this test, I look at a page. Then I cut and paste the text from that page into a blank page. If the blank page version looks better, they have failed the test. All the designer's work served only to make their page look worse :D

It's better to have no graphics than bad graphics.

This tutorial demonstrates one of the simplest ways to make a decent-looking website and avoid any risk of having bad graphics.