improve my web design skills

i’ve got a structure up but not sure how to design/decorate it…

...and I really have improved my basic skills, I just need to master some things. So I’m marking this as done, and am adding ‘Master CSS’ to my list.

and purchasing the Adobe Creative Suite 3 with the new Dreamweaver and other bells and whistles. Anybody have it? Any reactions, positive or negative?

Time to learn some new tricks. I am getting to the point where I understand pretty well how do do what I have designed my sites to do. They don’t require too much dynamic content, although I could add a little media player and a few other nice things. But now I am starting a new site, http://noisebox.net, for the promotion of musicians and poets (there isn’t much there yet, but at least it’s started). In the process, I’m realizing that I do quite a lot by hand that I don’t need to do, but learning to automate many of my design tasks would take too much of an initial time investment, so I keep doing things in a slower way. I also need to find a way to make my sites “pop” more without sacrificing fast loading times or browser compatibility. If anybody can suggest a few simple tips to improve appearance and functionality, I’d appreciate it.

This goal has fallen low on my list of priorities, frankly. I will pick it up again in the future.