If this is your first time to put up a website, and you're thinking of getting into some easy website design, there are some things that you should know. There are certain things that you should avoid, as a designer -- these elements may seem like a good idea to you at first, but they'll make your website unattractive. And if your design looks bad, then your visitors will be less inclined to stay long enough to see what your site is all about.

1.Scrolling text and cartoon GIFs. In the 1990s, these were a novelty, but the appeal quickly wore off. If you want to be taken seriously, maybe you should put down those dancing kitten animations and smileys from the header. Along with scrolling text, these animations make your site look old and clunky, and will only serve to distract users.

2.Low contrast/Big fonts. Putting dark letters on a dark background, or light ones on a light background, hampers the readability of your page. And don't try to increase readability by making your fonts larger. Use high-contrast colors and regular font sizes: 12 points for both Arial and Verdana, which are the most widely-recognized fonts on all web browser programs.

3.Very large image sizes. Users today expect their websites to load as fast as possible, so they can immediately see the site content. Slow-loading pages are a big turn-off for today's visitor""keeping them waiting for more than a few seconds make may them lose patience and just go to another, faster-loading site. Make your file sizes smaller. Keep your image file size to about 50KB per photo for medium-sized images. You should be able to find some graphics programs you can download for free, for easy website design.

4.Excessively lengthy blocks of text. Much of your site content will probably be text, but presenting them all at once will lower readability. Keep your text in columns, don't make your text stretch from one end of the window to the other. Columns make it easier for people to keep their place when reading a lot of text. But don't make your columns too long, either. If your text goes a lot longer than one screen height (about 768 pixels on the majority of monitors), then put the rest of the content on another page.

These are only a few of the design mistakes that inexperienced designers make. The Golden Rule for easy website design is: design for your intended visitors. Put in design elements that you think will appeal to your visitors, not just to yourself. Learn to look at your designs from a user's perspective. Visitors prefer pages that load quickly, with organized presentation, easily-navigable, and visually-appealing. Remember, you are only one of millions of pages out there, so if you don't make a good first impression, you may lose that first-time visitor for good.