1. Place your "appealing headline" below any banner or logo at top of page. This is headline that persuades your visitor to continue reading your homepage -- to spark their interest in your product or service. Write your headline to your target customer. The visitor should have no doubt about what kind of website he/she just entered.

If your purpose is to sell books, your headline should say something about books or a particular book that's very popular. This will insure your "targeted" potential customers that they are at right site for what they're searching for. Visitors who aren't looking for books really aren't your customers, are they? You're letting them know up front that they're in wrong website.

The reason for placing your headline below your logo or banner is because people tend to look at "picture" first and then begin reading below picture.

2. Place a scroll bar or navigation bar at right hand or left hand side of your homepage. A general rule of thumb is to place your scroll bar on left hand side if your website is information based and you offer just one to three products. Place your scroll bar on right hand side if your website is set up like a catalog offering many different products.

The scroll bar provides your visitor with options to move around within your website without crowding homepage. Your homepage should be an introduction to your website or your product or service, not your entire website. The information should be intriguing to your "target" visitor and lead visitor to next page or to your desired response at bottom of homepage.

3. Continue your homepage. Write to your visitor in a way that he/she can't wait to go to next page and continue. But don't stop there -- when your visitor gets to bottom, be sure to say "Go to Next Page Here..." or "Continue to Next Page...", something to persuade your visitor to go next page. The ... always leaves a sense of continuance also!

Implement these three methods while designing your homepage to insure navigation ability for your visitors. Remember, your visitors can only turn into paying customers if you get a chance to make your presentation.

You can visit their website for a huge selection of free backgrounds available that you can use on your website.

You will save background image to your hard drive same as you would any normal graphic image or clip art. Simply hold your mouse over background image you would like to use, right-click your mouse, and click on "Save Background As". A screen will pop up for you to save image to your hard drive. You can name image whatever you would like with .gif being suffix.

Such as: mybackgroundimage.gif

Inserting Tables

Once your background image is in place, you may begin designing with tables.

On sample web page you viewed earlier, I inserted one table that was 730 Pixels in width first. I chose a color for my table that was complimentary to background, and then began typing.

Next, I created a second table within first table, and gave it two columns or "cells". I resized column or "cell" on right to be only 20% of entire table width. This creates a sidebar navigation section on right. I also colored this table white to distinguish it from rest of web page.

Please remember to insert your background image before beginning your design with tables. Some designers place a background image, and then begin their writing without tables. But, I recommend using tables for simple fact that it helps you to organize your web pages and keeps everything in it's rightful place on your page when others are viewing it.

I hope you'll be able to accomplish many new looks with these simple little tips.