That is encouraging. If folks with no previous design experience (assuming) can dish out beautiful html and css, that is indeed encouraging to the rest of us :) Any pointers to templates or design guides?
Our general rule is, if you don't have any graphic design sense (and only about 10% of founders do), just make the site as sparse as possible. Worked for Google.
In at least one case (reddit), the founders had a great sense of design and yet chose to make the site sparse anyway. This was because as a news site they wanted to emphasize the information on the page and make the site itself fade into the background.
I want to amplify the point about emphasizing user-supplied information. About a year ago when my alumni class started using ourdoings.com for class notes, I knew graphic design was lacking. I was surprised by comments like "the new format looks great." Then I figured out that by making the information/photos people wanted more accessible, they were more pleased by what they saw.
The design of ourdoings.com is relatively subtle, as most picture frames are, but back then it was even uglier than it is now. Nevertheless, people look at what they're interested in.
I think it's just a matter of following a few core design principles in the early stages. Many of the founders aren't designers and the sites were somewhat built learning from each other.
There's probably some truth to this, but on the other hand, there are some good UI reasons for following conventions. Graphical conventions can make your application easier to use, because people already know them. The world of UI design is fulll of such conventions: red: stop, green: go, squares: check multiple, circles: check one. US light switches are easier to use than the European kind because they are more consistently mounted in the same direction. Designing UIs is all about finding metaphors that already make sense to people, either because they are used in the real world, or because they are used in some very popular systems people are already familiar with. (E.g., most desktop applications put "find" in the "edit" menu. Does it make sense? Not really. But by now, that's where people look, so that's where you should stick it.)
That said, there are some conventions in recently fashionable web applications that seem to be nothing but fashion. That's less of a UI design thing, and more of a marketing thing. Presumably, there is some sweet spot between total conformism and utter disregard for the contemporary norm that strikes the balance between attention-grabbing and comfort-instilling. Personally, I would say: when in doubt, keep it simple. (That's my personal taste speaking, not any kind of business experience.)
We were in WFP07, and just launched the new site this past weekend...it was designed during the time when we were talking to YC companies every week...I wonder if those discussions bred conformity.
