Just an example of something Myrh here talked about that works wonders. Pick any mnemonic or phrase you're likely to remember, like "Miz is a very sexy devil.". The site is.. well, let's use Backstage which is easily shortened to BS. Now I take the first two letters (where possible, one in one letter words) from each word and craft "miisavesede" from it. Add BS to the beginning since that's the site I'm logging into. "bsmiisavesede" is pretty much impossible to guess already, but let's make it even harder. Let's turn it into leetspeak. "b$m11$4v3$3d3". Hell, we can turn every other remaining letter into a CAP. "b$M11$4v3$3D3".
Of course, this has now become a fucking pain in the ass to type and remember even with the very easily remembered phrase, so we've overdone it somewhat. This is just an example of how to craft a unique and ridiculously hard to crack password while keeping it easy to remember and in just a few short steps. Let's see how quickly we went from plain text to gibberish:
"Miz is a very sexy devil"
"miisavesede"
"bsmiisavesede"
"b$m11$4v3$3d3"
"b$M11$4v3$3D3"
The last two look very similar, but suddenly forcing any brute-force attempt to find your password to have to deal with twice as many possibilities wherever there's letters has a rather impressive impact. So, five steps and we have a unique password. Change the steps to your taste, picking just one letter from each word, be it the second, first, last or whatever. Add caps in a different pattern maybe. You can keep the initial phrase though, very easy to remember.
There's never an excuse for having a normal word or name as a password, definitely not if it's all lower case. Another important thing to remember is to use unique passwords on different sites if possible, because you never know when a site derps up the security and your password turns out to be floating free out there on the intarwebz. If Backstage loses my password, the baddies only get access to that PM history. If I used the password elsewhere, they'd gain access to everything else.
Edit: Of course, a keylogger will sniff out any password you design once you use it, so all of the above is worthless if you don't also keep everything else under control. Virus scan and firewall, all that jazz. Using your browser's "remember this password" feature is actually quite handy in that respect, since it will then fill it in for you without the possible keylogger ever seeing it.