Website header design is just one component of building a successful website, although it is a crucial one - if your header graphic, which is usually the first thing a visitor sees, is off-putting in any way, then that visitor will hit their back button as fast as they can.

Want To Know Where To Get Good Website Header Designs?

Well, there are a few options.

Firstly, you can try designing them yourself.

This may sound like a daunting prospect - after all, if you're like me, you're probably not a trained graphic artist and may not have any real artistic ability.

But that doesn't matter - the key thing is to get started, and accept the fact that the first banners and graphics you create almost certainly won't be works of art.

Give yourself time, however, then you will improve, and you'll begin to create images that you are truly proud of.

Now, to get going, you may want to look for some sort of website header tutorial, and our good old friend Google will undoubtedly help you out there.

Next, you'll need some software, and although you could start with some cheap, or even free software, you will definitely find that the more often you create a website header banner, the more advanced your requirements of your image editing software will be. (That's probably why most professional graphic designers choose Adobe Photoshop - it's not cheap, but it's got everything you could possibly need.)

And finally, you just need to practise. You may never advance to being a full-time graphics artist, but you soon will be able to make your own blog header (and website header) that you can happily use on your own sites and blogs.

Secondly, you can outsource your graphic work.

The thought of outsourcing is a bit scary at first, but it needn't be, and there are plenty of companies out there that have been around for years that take some of the hassle and risk out of the equation for you.

The main thing here is to be as specific as possible with your requirements (e.g. what size or sizes you need, any particular colour schemes and/or fonts you want, what type of site it's going to be used on and in what niche), and remember to set a budget. This need not be great, as with people in Asia bidding on your projects, you can normally get a very reasonable price.

One company that has a great reputation when it comes to finding low-cost workers is oDesk, where you can search for and invite people with specific skills or you can just throw it open to anybody interesting in doing that work for you.

However, there are others, such as eLance, Rentacoder, Scriptlance and Guru.com, if you want to check those out.

And thirdly, you can buy ready-made header graphics.

This is maybe the easiest option in some ways, as you don't need to do any work yourself, nor do you need to get involved in the whole outsourcing thing.

But you do need to make sure that you buy website and/or blog header designs that fit your site and convey the image you wish to present to your visitors.

We've seen both ends of the spectrum here, and we have to say that there are few graphic designers out there who can create truly stunning images at reasonable prices.

Which means we were delighted when we recently came across the work of Jay Santos.

As you can see from the following samples of his work (which are a lot smaller than the images you'll be buying), they are really beautifully done:

Jay is selling 100 banners that are all of this super-high quality (in fact, you're buying 200 of them, because each banner is supplied both as a Photoshop PSD, with text already present, and as a JPG, without any text so you can add your own, just like we did with the banner at the top of this page) for the ridiculously low sum of just $77 USD.

To Save You Getting Your Calculator Out, That Works Out To Be Way Less Than $1 Per Image - $0.77 To Be Precise!

These gorgeous banners are not only great value, saving you tons of time too, but they are an inspiration to help you develop your own creativity and image-production skills.

So, if you want to get going fast, with banners that you can and will use on your websites (each of them could just as easily be used as a header for Blogspot or Wordpress), then we highly recommend getting a copy of Jay's Explosive Instant Headers before he comes to his senses and charges what this collection of banners is really worth.