art/layout/graphics design on the web is a rough field.
at the low end you have everyone and their brother who thinks they're a designer because they know how to use a drop shadow in photoshop and a tween in flash. They make useless pages with key elements improperly embedded in images, they don't even know about standards compliance let alone try to achieve it, and in an effort to make the page look just right in every browser they usualy rely on too-many-images and intensly complex tables (often auto-generated by a wysiwyg and therefore completely impossible to maintain).
At the high end you usualy contract with (or perhaps have on staff) a designer who's job is to literally just come up with a couple PSDs. They pick the color scheme, the navigational elements, the appearance, the positioning. Then they hand the PSDs of to web-developers who try and make an HTML version as close as possible while balancing the slightly more important goals of being cross-browser and standards compatable. Usually there's a working back-and-forth process between the two for a while. Adittionally there's usualy at least 2 or 3 designs tried out and some focus group testing between them.
So the question is how do you, and "in the middle" guy, put together a website thats both visually pleasing and usable? Easy. We're technical guys (if not, how'd you get an account here ), therefore it makes the most sense to pursue learning the standards and best practices for coding a website. As for the design piece, go back to the first rule of web development: There's no such thing as plagarism
bart