Well this is not what you asked for, but this what you will get from me, and I sincerely hope you read all of it.:

Dont come to terms with the fact that you are not the greatest of designers. Design and art CAN be learned. My art teacher told us that last year, and I believe in it 120%. DO NOT expect to crack open notepad, stare at a blank screen and create something beautiful. Design is half about knowing basic principles that involve design, and then being able to use inspiration to create functional art.

To help you with basic principles of design:

How C.R.A.P. Is Your Site Design?
Web Design from Scratch

I suggest you look at the article, and then take a look at the second website, which you can spend hours reading.

Then, to get inspiration, check out CSS galleries. (I wont link to em, but I really like cssmania.com)

Now, one of the best books you can get to think like a designer, and immensely improve your design skills is invest in Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. You will learn markup, mockup, and inspiraton. Best money I ever spent.

To vastly make it easier to improve your skills after you have done the above is to come up with an idea, and go through a markup phase, mockup, and design it. You will be surprised I guarantee.

It took me months, literally to try and make a site look good. I stared at sites that were text only, and was ready to quit becuase I couldnt make a site that looked half as good, and the site is just freakin text.

I started creating tons and tons of shitty, (pardon my french) extremely shitty designs. Then, I slowly, (Very freaking slowly) improved aspects of designs, and kept improving, and kept improving, and then it clicked.

Trust me, if you give up, you wont get the chance for it to click.

Let me do a visual show of what I am talking about:

I started with stuff like this,

Style 1

Very crappy, but doing that gave me some sort of weird confidence. That little black line at the top was the greatest thing since slice bread.

Style 2

That was my next attempt, I thought it was on the right track. (I was wrong, but hey)

Okay

With this one, I figured, hey thats decent, I could be proud of that.

Full O It

As you can see by the text, I thought it was great. It was very bad, but I used things I had learned like alignment, etc.

Finally, one that I was really, truly happy with was this:

This

As you can see, alot of did look pretty good.

Anyway, after that, I took a little hiatus and focused on learning as much as possible, until I finally applied alot to My site

The point of that speel was to show that you will make designs that may not wow, because everyone does at first, but if you stick to it, and get those principles down, I guarantee that you will improve.

Jeremy,

I know what you mean, i'm very much a coder rather than a designer - which is why I like this site so much!

One comment i'd make about the code of your design is that the links for the navigation and the side bar seem, at least to me, to be lists of links and therefore should probably be marked up as a list and then styled as necessary.

-Mark

I had that same problem, as in not being able to use graphics programs. There are many books you can try that are specifcally for web design in photoshop. Once I started putting graphics in webpages, they went from half way there, to finished. A really basic book is The Photoshop Anthology from Sitepoint, or there is one at lynda.com you can check out.

Regarding your code, it looks like you have a minor case of div-itis, just remember that you dont have to wrap everything in a div, and for text, you can use selectors

for example, instead of saying "div class sidebar text"

within your css you can use, #sidebar p {style}

JJenZz: It looks great in IE6.