Designing Websites

So before i start a design project I can easily spend 1 hour looking at sites like pintrest in searching on there for designs etc or other sites like theme forest themes but pintrest is better as you can kind of a build up a board of parts of sites you want it to be like and build up on that. There really are a lot of resources out there. Such as for background patterns http://subtlepatterns.com/ is a great websites :)

I hope this helps :)

Look up other websites that are similar to what you want to build and make notes on certain elements that you think work well.

http://www.colourlovers.com and https://kuler.adobe.com are good places for inspiration for colors. Try to find colors that match what you want your website to convey.

Good artists copy, great artists steal - Pablo Picasso

I'm not suggesting you steal someone else's work but there is nothing wrong in taking your inspiration from others. A good thing to do is to start a scrapbook. This can be just a folder on your desktop that you use to dump screenshots into. If I come across a nav, side bar, heading, font, footer, or anything that I like I take a quick screenshot and save it to my scrap book. When I'm working on a new design I turn to my scrap book and play around with different elements until I get a unique look and feel then flesh it out.

If you want to be a bit more advanced with your scrapbook try Evernote's Skitch app (for windows and mac). The Evernote browser plugin will let you save sections of the page to your Evernote notebooks too. If you're on a mac you can just hit CMD + SHIFT + 4 to bring up cross-hairs and draw round any element you want to screenshot.