There’s a lot that can help a design. With consistency, we’ve learned that it can do a lot. Think of a site as a living object. In order for your site to become a living object, it needs to breathe, or at least breathing room. Uneven breathing habits will cause panic attacks.
Now let me apply that to design. When creating a site, it’s important to have consistent padding and margining. Now, if you’re not familiar with those terms, lets start with the basics. 
Let’s imagine we have a box. The amount of space inside the box is a term called padding. The amount of space separating from elements outside of it is known as margining. It can get confusing at times, but in thinking of it in terms of the box, it shouldn’t fail you.
So, let’s take a look at a recent design of mine. Notice how in between each element of the site I’ve put 20 pixels of space. My site is breathing well! Also, if you take a look at the amount of space in each container, you can notice it has a consistent padding of 20 pixels. Whether your margining is 10 pixels or 50 pixels, just make sure it is the same as the other elements surrounding. Notice that I have a sidebar on the left which has a padding for each element of 10 pixels. Since the sidebar has different content, it will add a good amount of contrast.
Check out the grid feature in Adobe’s Photoshop to further help you in succeeding in the consistency of padding and margining.
