Many amateur web designers marvel at the skills of other designers without realizing that there are some simple tricks for creating great looking web sites.

HTML is not a friendly language for laying out text and graphics. The advent of Cascading Style Sheets improved this, but a simple solution to the problem of layout is to use tables without borders. Within HTML, this can be done by adding the attribute BORDER="0" to the TABLE tag. However, most HTML editors, such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage, allow you to set the border to 0 as one of the properties of the table.

Perhaps the biggest problem newcomers face is in finding appropriate images that look good. In many cases, images are found using a simple Google image search. More often that not, these images will be under copyright and using them risks potential legal action. One way around this is to purchase royalty-free images on CD / DVD or directly from the Web. Of course, you need to be careful to check the license agreement. For example, the images may only be royalty-free for non-commercial uses. Another solution is to take your own images using a digital camera (or scanning in your own photos). Again, to minimize the risk of legal action you should obtain permission from people shown in the photos before placing them on the web.

Even after locating or creating images, a good design may still be difficult given the 'blocky' nature of the photos that are typically in a rectangular shape. This leads to the major tip for improving your web site design. If using stock photos, look for 'photo-objects' rather than photos. These are photos which have had the background removed. Where the background should be is actually transparent, which means you can put the photo-objects on any background.

When using your own images, you can easily create photo-objects by using a 'green screen' behind the subject you are photographing. You can load the image into any piece of imaging software that has a magic wand tool. Then simply click on a section of the green screen and press delete to remove the background.

There is nothing 'magical' about a green screen. Any piece of material that has a consistent color and is fairly flat will do. Green or blue work best because these are very different from skin tones that won't disappear when you use the magic wand. (Of course, if they are wearing green clothes these may suddenly become transparent).

Backgrounds can be removed using a magic wand tool (and eraser for fine details) from photos with a normal background, but expect to take many steps and more time. Even if you can't remove the background you can add some spice to your images with simple steps such as adding a drop shadow or adding a frame like a photograph.

With these simple steps you should be able to develop web sites that look far more professional.