Using Website Templates 

Most html editors and all packages come with some kind of templates which you can edit to a greater or lesser degree.

They tend not to be of the best quality and fairly inflexible. In some cases, no graphics of any kind are provided.

This is not really such a great problem. Fancy websites may please the eye of the owner, but they probably do very little for the visitor in terms of supplying information, and may even be a distraction.

Nevertheless, one quick and easy way to put a website together is to use a customizable, good quality, template to which you simply add the text. There are also variations on this theme which I'll take you through.

I run a couple of cooking sites, and if you visit The Cool Cook you will see an example of a good quality template which has been edited by me using a simple text editor; in this case Notepad.

Templates such as this are widely available on the internet. You can even have them custom-made for you, although expect to pay a lot of money for that.

My favorite site for this kind of thing is AllWebCo Design, where the prices range from free to not much more than $100 (more if you want an exclusive design) and the quality is excellent. So is the support.

Most website building programs, whether they be html editors or all-in-one packages, do not have graphic creation built in. The exception is Sitespinner and you can find details of that on the point and click page.
 
Take this particular website, the one you are looking at now, for example. It was built using graphics designed in a program called Xara Webstyle4, the text was edited with Coffee Cup and the whole thing brought together using XsitePro.
 
Xara is a brilliant graphics program which is intuitive and very easy to use. It also has some great graphics. There's a free trial available, so take the opportunity of playing around with it. It's a lot of fun.
 
In addition, there are sites on the web where you can create your own graphics for nothing. They tend to be fairly basic, but don't let that put you off. Once you place them against a nice background (which you can do in most editors) they can look as good as anything else.
 
And don't forget it's website content that sells books, not graphics.
 
My favorite site for free graphics is cooltext.com, where you can build logos and buttons to your hearts content, and then download them for free.