improving your design skills?
og1: Learn to wireframe and sketch out your websites ahead of time. It is much easier to try ten different layouts on paper than starting them in css. Some people like to mockup in photoshop, but I prefer paper. It is just faster for me.Some people already mentioned "Non-Designers Design Book" - Robin WilliamsSome other good ones are:"Design of Everyday Things" - Donald Norman (Conceptual, but gets you in the right mindset)"Dont Make me Think" - Steve Krug (Usability matters)"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" - Edward Tufte (he has a set of 4 books on information visualization, all of which are good)One of the key concepts that I've taken from these books is  that everything in a page has a visual weight so you must consider how everything in a page balances out together. Never add stuff just for the sake of adding it, because it will distract the user from the information they are trying to gather.And most of all just build more websites and try to improve each one. Design is still a lot like programming. If you dont like the particular look of your site you can refactor it. I know you don't get the benefit of seeing it, but some of the best designed sites out there have gone through multiple iterations.