When I was the first time design a website for a company, the world of website design is not as advanced as now. It was fifteen years ago when usually people only use Microsoft FrontPage as the HTML editor. For personal or business website, if you just put a bunch of pictures and using different font sizes and colors without consistency, people already think that it was something. Well, now for professional web design it is not anymore.

What is a good website? As I develop TemplatePanic, a web design blog, I will try to give my opinion here.

The first thing to think about making a good website is consistency. A good website should have a consistent design throughout all pages. Using a Liberty Statue as a background for a page and the Borobudur Temple for another is not consistent. Your website should flow seamlessly like a software program, not like a composite of 20 different sites piled on top of one another. The consistency of fonts also must be considered. Make sure to use the same font in every page. It is okay to change the font for different section of the website, but my opinion, use only two different font for the whole website. The variation can be made by using a different size or style (bold, italic). The good and easy way to do this is using CSS (Cascade Style Sheet) to control it. Nowadays people use CSS to make the design of their websites.

It is true that you will need time to learn CSS, but the good way to start is by using web templates to design a website. Now there are a lot of websites provide web templates. Like TemplatePanic, they help people who don’t know about web design or do not have time to design by themselves by providing various templates that are ready for use. By using this service, someone can get a professional look for his website with only a little custom setting.

Compatibility is another important thing to consider in website designing. Not everyone use the same browser, not everyone use the same screen resolution, and not everyone use the same computer. Your website should looks good in all of them! Before you launch your website, try it in few different browsers. Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Safari and the annoying Internet Explorer usually enough to make a testing. Don’t forget to try them in different screen resolutions. There are still many people using the 800×600 pixel resolution, and you need to think about them too.

TemplatePanic helps you to make a professional website by giving many useful information and downloadable stuffs.