Spacing is one of the most important things in creating a light and nice looking layout design. How do we choose spacing? first of all choose a general text size, the size that will be applied to long text or most repetitive text. From that point we will rich the size of the line-height which should be at least 2*font-size. Now Spacing between titles an text should be 2*line-height. The spacing between text and border of content should be 1.5 of line-height. Do not enlarge too much your site.. and specially in vertical size.. remember one rule : "no more than 3 scrolls of a mouse wheel".

 

Volumes . If you like, and the site theme allows you , you can play with 3d effects such as 3d buttons icons , shadows . It will give you an nice aspect of your design. How to obtain a 3d effect? Any 3d object have shadow on the environment in which he stays. So basicly you have to duplicate your object... move it with one layer below the original, desaturate or decrease lightness, blur it a little bit an voila, you have a shadow of an object. Now you can move , scale and distort this shadow in order to achieve a realistic effect. Remember a shadows always has the same color that the environment has, but from a darker tone.

 

Same elements on the same page. That means if you use an element (like rounded corners, or a specific font family or a color gamma) keep it in entire page. What can happens  if you will not mentain the same style? You will make an ugly salad from your web page.And I don't think you want this.

 

Font Family. Must be in harmony with the style of the page . Suppose you have an oldish theme you will use an old style font , or if it is a default you can use a font with serifes (Georgia, Times New Roman), for an economical , or news oriented layout you can take something like Arial or Trebuchet MS or Verdana. Remember: a good designer can make a great design only from fonts and shapes.