For some perspective: take a few sites that you use every day (e.g. Google, possibly Facebook, any news site that you visit regularly) and check on First Versio

For some perspective: take a few sites that you use every day (e.g. Google, possibly Facebook, any news site that you visit regularly) and check on First Versions (http://www.firstversions.com/ http://www.firstversions.com/) to see what their first publicly available iterations look like. If that doesn't lower your bar for visual design, nothing will :) Remember also that many "minimalist" / "undesigned" sites (e.g. Craigslist) are quite popular. "Good" design isn't necessarily more elaborate or complicated; often users will prefer an interface that is concise and clear with a few well-thought-out options to one that looks nicer but is unusable. I'm no designer myself, but I've done a passable job of maintaining reasonable design in my projects with a few principles: understand what your users want to do, then help them do that; use visual cues consistently (contrast, color, size, font weight, etc.); pick easily readable fonts; and so on. A bit of reading up on design from various perspectives helps. Here's some of my favorite resources: https://www.nngroup.com/reports/ https://www.nngroup.com/reports/, The Design of Everyday Things, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/, Understanding Comics (no, seriously! A lot of "sequential art" principles transfer well to web design), https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility (accessibility isn't just about helping the disabled; a more accessible site is, well, more accessible to everyone). Also, learn to use the tools that are out there. There are color pickers to help you build reasonable color schemes, font libraries (e.g. Google Web Fonts) for easy-to-use readable fonts, icon libraries (e.g. Noun Project) for decent icons covering common user actions. CSS3 itself has many goodies (transitions, ::before / ::after pseudo-classes, etc.), and is worth learning in detail. Even if you end up working with designers - I certainly do for many projects - it's worth your time to understand the basic principles.