designing a 1-2-3 step guide

Being primarily a web developer, I'm always looking for tools or guidelines that make it hard for me to mess up the user experience. I'm looking to create a 1-2-3 step guide. I'm thinking that it should be small boxes that are all visible at the same time, containing maybe a cropped picture and some text, but I'm open to suggestion or will take what you've got.

Is there any web tools out there that can help me create such a guide either some kind of generator or some free css templates that demonstrate it.

So what I'm looking for is some guidelines to how to present in a pretty and presentable way, at best exemplified by a reference, and possible also a reference to a website tool that will help me to generate a guide that looks good.

I'm talking about usable examples like: http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/05/simplifying-website-usability-the-3-step-approach/