What are some good sites that give good Web design tips and show the current design trends?

I just submitted a client of mines site for review and the result wasn't what I expected. I'd like to learn what are the most common design standards now and what's your opinion about keeping individuality in your site design? With me, I dont want to make my sites like everyone else, but I don't want my designs to fail to the viewer either. Here are a few samples:





Finished Client:


http://comeliveinpanama.com





WIP Personal Business Site (no main background yet):


http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/attach...





What I'm commonly seeing around the web:


http://yoyogames.com





Where might I learn these common web dev standards?

What are some good sites that give good Web design tips and show the current design trends?
The newest web authring standards are valid XHTML 1.1 and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It is possible to creating very clean and appealing websites in CSS without relying on graphics, such as border styles, gradients, rounded corners, etc...





As far as the coding goes, your websites shoud be tableless design layouts with all formatting inside an external CSS file. Take a look at these websites for some ideas and current trends.





www.cssdrive.com





www.thebestdesigns.com





If you need a good tableless design layout, take a look at the source code of my website, I don't have a lot of graphics, its clean and it validates as Valid XHTML 1.1 and Valid CSS.





www.insightstyle.com
Reply:CSS is for robots, what you need is to spend more time on what is pleasing to the eye whether it's text or graphics, Flash would be the best tool to learn, there are a million sites designed with flash just have to check them out and you'll form your own ideas. Simple is always better, less colors, less fonts, less font size changes, etc.
Reply:Most site's today are moving away from graphics heavy / table heavy designs (like http://comeliveinpanama.com/ ) to lighter , graphically neat css based designs.





The trend is to move heavy (lots of slices and images) old style based table designs to cleaner modern standards CSS designs. CSS based designs are more efficient at using a modern browsers capabilites, they make it easier to modify the site look and feel, they download and render faster, and are much friendlier for site indexing by search engines. Most major sites have already changed all or large parts of their web sites to css based designs.. (cnn.com , microsoft.com/vista , slashdot.org etc)





Here are some site's with graphics design ideas.


Gallery of modern CSS designs


http://www.cssbeauty.com/gallery/





Commercial Template Site


http://www.templatemonster.com





Free css-styled designs


http://www.freecsstemplates.org/








Graphics design is just that, it's about being creative, having a polished clean feel. There's some amount of inate talent needed but you can gleen most of what you need by mimicing other successfuly works.





Good luck!