Modular Web Design. On consistency part of the principle of consistency, doubtlessly known to every web designer, is reusing graphics, a great method for bandwidth conservation. Thus, you may think about the consistency principle as an analog of reusing, applicable not only to particular common graphics but to the entire style, graphic themes, colors, fonts, and other aspects of your design. Although not always resulting in file size savings, consistency is one of the first things to take care of if you want to improve the quality of your work. But that's how it is.
Beginners tend to think of design as of the art of decorating things.
They take their content and start to chew upon it, figuring out different ways to spice up navigation buttons, headings, images, text blocks, etc. What I would like to stress here is that when you introduce a new element into your composition, your job as a designer is not that of decorating it, i.e. making it more complex , but on the opposite, that of making it simpler , cutting out everything which is not essential, coordinating, aligning or even merging it with what is already present on the page. I'm not denying the fact that some professional compositions are extremely complex and variegated. Even if you're not artistically minded at all, you can produce surprisingly neat pages just by pedantically, methodically applying the consistency principle and minimizing the diversity of all design features. Once you break exact equality between elements, you have to go the rest of the way and make them contrasting or, at least, obviously dissimilar.