You need to remember that website design is not only about having an attractive site, there are a number of other considerations.

Here are the three most important Rules of Website Design.

The CONTENT of your site must be interesting and worthwhile.

This is probably the most important rule of web design. If someone has found your website, you must give them a reason to stay on it. You must make it "sticky" - and can use one or more of the following.

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Include unique content - if someone has found your site, you have what they are looking for - so present your information or product in a unique way which will make a visitor choose your site over another.

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Include a message board or a chatroom which keeps visitors coming back to your site.

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UPDATE YOUR SITE frequently to keep your visitors coming back. You could run a weekly featured article for example.

The site must be easy to navigate.

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Make sure that when a visitor first visits your site, they can get what they want with one or at most 3 clicks of a mouse. A visitor looking for information is unlikely to follow 4 clicks to get to the information they want.

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Make sure that the buttons or links to your pages are obvious.
It is a good idea to also have text links to your web pages as well as buttons, for example at the bottom of each page. This is because some people disable images so that they can browse faster, AND more importantly, some search engines do not follow hyperlinks from images, so when they spider your site, they will not pick up the linked pages.

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If your site is very large and you cannot make navigation easy with one or two clicks, consider using a Pop-up menu and you don't need to know how to write Javascript to use it - you can "cut and paste" the script into your HTML.

Optimize Your Graphics.

Use .jpeg (.jpg) and .gif graphics for your images. These are the two file formats universally used on the web - basically because they take up less space without much loss of quality.

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Optimization - This is where an image is reduced to its smallest file size while retaining its best quality.
A basic rule of thumb is save the images in .jpeg format for photos and use the .gif format for your logos, and other graphics. Understanding the difference in how these file formats compress an image is important in designing good web pages.

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The second thing to remember is that the larger an image is the more KB it will take up, so don't fill your page with photos that are 600 x 480 pixels that take up the whole screen - most visitors will not wait for such large graphics to download - anything over 30 KB takes too long. However remember also that you can make a large GIF take up only a few KB by using one or two colors - useful for backgrounds.

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Finally remember there is no point in including unnecessary graphics on your page - they only take up space. Don't waste space with Java applets or animated GIFs just because you want to show off some cool new effect unless the graphics will really make your site sticky.
Once again - look at it from your visitors point of view - Will the graphics really make your site sell?