Simply surfing the Internet and visiting lots of websites is a great way to get inspired in making an attractive website
. After you have a lot of ideas, you can start making mockups already even if you do not yet know how to make a website. In fact, planning the design and overall layout of the site in advance can help you figure out what web programming languages to work on. Thanks to the developing HTML5, many sites can be made using HTML alone. Of course studying JavaScript, Flash and PHP can help you even more if you want to add interactive elements. Although there are so many possibilities in executing your design, you should always make sure that your final design doesn't stray too far away from your site's theme.
You have to figure out the type of message that your site will be portraying to your visitors. If you plan on presenting a lot of textual information, you have to come up with a minimalistic layout that brings emphasis to the text without adding other distracting elements. At the same time, the design shouldn't look too bland or else your visitors won't bother reading the content. Adding some hints of JavaScript code can make your website more dynamic looking too since it can be used to power animations and other transition effects.
It is okay to add some twists to your website design or any templates that you find because visitors like to be treated with experiences that are vastly different than other websites. Even if you can market your site well, it is still important that you establish a loyal fanbase so these loyal people will keep checking out your website for updates or at least subscribing to any social networking profiles that are linked to your site.
A good website design is even more important if you are selling something to your audience. You may even need to go deep down to the multimedia depths by creating compelling video content or at least some flashy animations that the Adobe Flash platform is capable of doing. If you are confident that your audience is using the latest browsers to check out your website, you can try some HTML5 coding to spice up your website too.
Coming up with that solid website design idea doesn't happen overnight. But you can speed up the process by visiting as many sites as you can and bookmark the ones you think look attractive. Use that as a guide to finding some good web design templates and study the code. Figure out what it takes to make some sweeping changes to the template so you can claim it as your own and impress your audience.