This will be part one of a series we hope to be writing on simple ways to improve your sites design. If you have any techniques that you like to use or find attractive leave us a comment.

We also plan on offering tutorials on how to do some of these techniques so if you want to know how to do something, leave us a comment!

NAVIGATION

Rather then a traditional horizontal or vertical link setup, try something like a map. This is creative and a great way for your viewers to enjoy your sites navigation. There are a lot of ways to make your navigation different, such as instead of ordinary tabs, try styling them in unique ways such as the tabs on a folder.

BACKGROUND

Grunge in design is a great way to add character to flat colors. Using grunge can add a subtle texture that makes your backgrounds and images stand out.

Find Brushes

There is a fine line between being too simple and being cluttered. Using patterns in your designs correctly can be the perfect addition to your site. Try patterns that you don’t usually see to really stand out.

Find Patterns

Wood is a popular design trend of recent years and is gaining popularity for its ability to blend well with many designs. A subtle use of a wood element is a great idea to fill in a space that could use some life.

Find Wood & Similar Textures

Another trend that is starting to pickup is watercolors. Web designs are evolving further into pieces of art with trends like watercolor. A great way to add texture to your background.

Find Watercolor Brushes

Notebook-like paper lines are great elements for designs that are writing related.

Find Notebook Paper

Adding items like coffee cups, books, pens and other items that you might find on your table are good ways to add personality to your designs,

Find Desk Items

SMALL ADDITIONS

A paperclip is a great way to make a part of your design more realistic; tied together with the notebook paper lines can make realistic looking paper. Nails, tacks, pins etc. could be other objects to use. Tape is another small way to add something to your design.

Find Paper Clips

Post-It Notes are simple ways to style a small sections of your site. If you have a twitter update section using a post it note background could be a way to make the updates stand out.

OTHER

Stitching is another cool technique one can use in their designs to create borders or shapes.

Adding a background to your text can help it stand out. This technique is also effective when you have a background that might make it hard for your readers to see the text.

An interesting addition that I have always found unique is the use of elements such as doors, windows etc. to frame items of your site.

Are there places that you know of to find great resources for your website? Leave us a comment and help others.

Have any other ideas? Give us your and you’ll be credited for them, just leave a comment below the post.

When you are offering a service online you need to think of how you are going to offer it and at what price. But before you decide on a price you should decide how you are going to benefit from offering your service.

There are variety of different users on the internet and have many different needs. How you fill these needs will determine your success.

There are three basic ways that you can offer and service and earn money from your hard work.

1. Free Content

Internet users greatly prefer getting their content free, well who wouldn’t right?

Well the problem is how are you going to earn money from offering content for free? What you can do is offer your content for free, which will increase the readers and visitors to your site then you need to monetize your website by placing relevant ads for your readers to click. You can earn quite a good income from clicks alone. There is an infinite source of information on the internet about ads so we won’t go into that.

You could also use referral links or sell ad space on your site.

2. Paid Content

Paid content can be a huge earner if you have the right product or service. With paid content it can be much harder to earn an income because there is so much competition. There will always be people willing to pay for getting a better service.

If you can provide a unique/better service or product then this could definitely be the option for you.

3. Free and Paid Content

I prefer this option because it can really provide you with various options. If your paid content is not doing so well then you have the revenue from the ads to make up. If you are a wordpress theme site you could offer free content such as lesser quality wordpress themes and possibly turn the viewers that were looking for a free option into customers buying your premium paid content.

If you have had to make one these choices and would like to share your experiences we would love to hear from you in the comment section.

The benefits of creating a theme for your website is that it allows you to seperate your website from the competition and create a lasting impression on your users. A theme also helps to inspire creativity as you can style ordinary elements such as buttons or a sidebar with elements that are inspired from your theme.

There are so many websites on the internet, how are you going to make yourself unique?

As we have already discussed, creating a theme can help individualize your site from its competitors. Creating a theme that is relevant to your topic can make your site much more unique. Using textures, elements and images can improve your websites overall look.

Deciding On A Theme

What your website theme is going to be will depend on what type of website you are creating. For our purposes we will pretend we are making a web design site. One benefit of this genre is that there are a million directions that you can go.

When you have so many directions to go with there are two general choices you can make: Make a completely unique theme or make a theme that relates to your website name. If your website was called Pirate Designs you could make a theme using elements related to pirates.

Designing With Your Theme

Alright so lets pretend our web design site is called Pirate Designs, how are we going to design our website? First lets think of what comes to mind when we think of pirates. When I think of pirates I think ships, swords, cross bones, guns, gold and treasure.

We could use wood for the background, a treasure chest pieces to build a sidebar, cross bones for a logo. For colors its best to use colors that work well together, using different shades of brown from dark brown to a light tan would work well for a pirate inspired theme.

Other elements that you can style are things such as list bullets which could be gold bullion’s, input boxes could have a gold border etc.

You can see that once you decide on a theme and start designing it, it gets easier to think of creative ways to style your site. If your stuck on your theme search on a image site using the keywords related to your theme to get inspired.

Finding & Making Your Theme Elements

You can find some great free patterns and textures from these sites:

Squidfingers

DinPattern

Shizoo

For images you can check out:

Flickr

stock.xchng

I hope that you found this post interesting and useful.

We would love to compile a list of website that use unique and creative themes for their websites so if you have one leave us a link in the comments below and maybe your site will be featured.