improving your design skills?
CoryMathews: Normally the biggest thing people screw up is the colors. Use a color generator and then always pick colors from the theme. Two of my fav sites for this arehttp://colorschemedesigner.com/ 
and
http://kuler.adobe.com/The next step after color is Typography. You don't need to get into all the nitty gritty crap about it but choose some good fonts normally something very clean and simple is your best bet. ie Arial, Helvelica, Verdana (used on this site) and Georgia. When you get into other fonts its very easy to use them incorrectly. For example you do not want to use Georgia as body text its to hard to read but it makes great headlines.After those two changes the third is the hardest, making things feel well designed. Take a look at how other people have done similar things. A great site for this is http://patterntap.com/Just because something is simple/spare/plain does not mean it cannot look good. For example take a look at these minimal siteshttp://www.fedthread.org/fr/today/
http://mattbango.com/
http://www.pixelhavenllc.com/
http://bobulate.com/