Web designers excel in their chosen field through determination and hard-work over a number of years. There can be no short-cut in this regard. However, there is such a thing as an "eye for design" by which I mean a latent appreciation for aesthetic beauty and an intuitive feel for proportion and symmetry; but creativity shouldn't be expressed like free jazz, but restrained with set guidelines and rules.

There are a great deal of conventions to follow in layout and design.

The first big mistake that many fall for is to design a site for a particular niche, creating a site that is visually different from all others in that category merely to stand out from the crowd.

It never works. Use colour and visual clues commonly associated with that category. For instance, if you are designing for a theatre then use images of curtains and wooden floorboards; if you are putting together a site for a book club then have obvious images of books. Remember, obvious is good.

Colour convention too needs to be observed with pink and purple for baby-orientated sites; green for environment and yellow for young children's sites as just a few examples.

Colour is important as well on certain page elements. All links should be blue and underlined. This is true for all the search engines and it is ingrained in our daily user experience. You can't reinvent the wheel, so don't even try.

As for layout, always place a search box in the top half of the page. A sizeable minority of users consistently always use the search facility to navigate around a site; and a logo that links to the homepage is a must for every contemporary website. This is one convention that has come into common use over the last few years.

Always have a contact form within easy access of the user, preferably as a link in the main menu. Not only this but put the address and other contact information in the footer. This could be a legal requirement for charities and certain types of businesses. Like a link to the homepage on your logo, users have now come to expect this information in this area on every site.

You need to be able to describe just what your website or business is in one paragraph. This then needs to be at the very least placed in a prominent position on the home page, and preferably on every page; although failing that a tagline of between 3 to 8 words will suffice.

Spacing and distance between items on a page and in particular heading, paragraphs and lines of text are everything. Never, ever present blocks of text which are smaller than 12px as anything beneath this size is uncomfortable to read.

Fitting into this need is the grid layout. Although grids are fairly new to online design no self-respecting web designer would tackle a job without using one.

Above are just a few web design conventions. There is enough in existence to fill a book but these are some of the important ones.

Remember, we need a triumph of function over design. Don't let your creativity dictate your output; follow the rules and guidelines already established.