Desiging websites is a very personnal thing. The more people you talk to the more opinions you'll hear. So I figure why not share some of mine? I try not to get too obsessed about these things, life's far too short, but some things I feel stronger about than others.
The thing is, I tend to take two different standpoints on most matters, I feel that for a personnal site, like this, the author should be able to basically do whatever they like. I know my colour scheme isn't very popular for instance, and in truth if I had more patience I'd probably make a few small changes. There are certain parts of this site that were writen hurriedly, little things that I keep meaning to revise, things I feel can be done better, things I feel should be done better. But since it's a personal site I don't stress out over it as much as I should. However I do feel very strongly about certain sites, things like government resources. I am both appalled and ashamed that the website for my local council is overloaded with Flash animations and other things that hide the content from it's visitors. This is something that should be accessible to everyone, not just people with the latest toy.
Anyway, I figure I'll share some of my opinions with random passer-bys, the thing to remember is that this is just my personal opinion about web-design, it's not the law. Somethings will sound good, others not, but in truth the one thing I believe in all through is that most of these things have a place. I talk a bit about style sheets and some of the nice clean tricks you can do with them, I also have an accompanying piece on some of the more specialised tricks you can do. One of my favourite soapboxes to climb onto is the use of tables to control the layout of non-tabular data, which isn't something you hear people say everyday.