Our Duty
Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it “work”.
For us wonderful folk who make websites, it’s our duty to read John Allsopp's seminal A Dao of Web Design at least once a year. For an article that was written way over a decade ago, many of those points still offer so much significance today.