Designer's Block...

Plenty of sleep and getting away from the computer for awhile will help with creativity.

A lot of designer/developers hire/ask a friend or an freelancer to do there site for them, because one of the hardest things to design is your own site.

Got one of those at the moment as well for layout on item I’m working on. I basically stripped it down to bare structure/skeleton without layout and waited for ideas. That didn’t help so I got my big pile of design books and am going through all stuff quickly to see what pops up. Usually browsing superfast through all categories will bring some impulse ideas and I write/sketch them down. Then take time to reflect and think before deciding. Going trough books on typographic, type-in-motion, logo, letterhead, webdesign etc helps. If all fails, hire a designer, lol just kidding

Happens to the best of us mate
This is probably obvious but I always start by browsing other sites to find bits and pieces I like the look of, to get inspired… be it a little JavaScript animation, a cool navigation menu or the whole look n’ feel/colour scheme of a website.
After that I tend to split my ideas into 2 separate “channels”, function and design.
You generally need to know what functionality you want before you can design it, as what it does will always influence the design.
Then usually comes the hard part, which you yourself are stuck on and so am I more often than not, lol. I guess the main reason is because there are literally too many styles to choose from !
The pure css route with simple lines and a functional feel, the over the top grungey style, the gradient based style, the flashy JavaScript style etc. Then you have a whole set of other things to ponder over, fluid vs fixed vs elastic, static vs dynamic, columns vs no columns… the best idea is to just pick a style and stick with it, worst case scenario if you’re not 100% satisfied with it you can always start from scratch and reuse the code in some other project down the line, hehe. I tend to just stick with the simple gradient based designs with css sprites ‘cause you can’t go wrong them . Unfortunately for us web devs there’s no shortcut for coming up with a great design but hopefully me explaining my method helps a bit, haha, even though my approach is probably about as bulletproof as a wet paper bag!

A lot of designer/developers hire/ask a friend or an freelancer to do there site for them, because one of the hardest things to design is your own site.

So true !

I had the same problem. My previous websites were fancy and full of animated wow crap. I realized that nobody cares on how cool my flash animations are and I should have focused on my own work. So I did. I turned my wordpress blog into a minimalistic creative portfolio and got so many more contacts. I’m quite happy this way and the site looks also very sleek and professional now.

I’d suggest you to use a proper workflow focusing first on the target you want to achive and not on how pretty the site looks. Do not confuse content with the container.

Smoke a big fat….

Fish on the BBQ ….