This is a short list of web sites that are more complex and better looking than the ones I design. My page on usability and my page on church web design are both for beginners. This list shows what advanced, amateur designers can do.
UU Fellowship of Harrisonburg, Virginia; clean, crisp and classic.
Paint Creek UU Congregation, in Rochester, Michigan. Visually stunning.
River of Grass UU Congregation in Plantation, Florida. They use a 100% table, which gives you a horizontal scroll bar you don't need, but the site is stunning.
Panhandle Chapter,
Backcountry Horsemen of Idaho: a beautiful site.
On the other hand, there are professionals who have made really stupid mistakes. For several years Wells, Fargo Bank had a page for customers with 401k accounts. It used a fixed text size. (I won't link to it, because you need an account to access it, and besides, they have since fixed it.)
Consider; as people get older, their eyes get worse, their 401k balance grows (usually) and they become more concerned with their account. You know that. I know that. Wells, Fargo's designers didn't know that. They were annoying their largest customers the most. As we aged, our 401k balances grew (this was before the crash of 2008), our eyesight got worse and having to squint - or, in my case, having to use the "Accessibility" tab to tell my browser to ignore the text size the fools had specified - became more and more annoying.
That's what you get for hiring a bunch of 20-something hotshots with perfect eyesight, 21-inch monitors, 120+ IQs and no common sense.
This is a page in my site's section on
Web Design. The section has a page for:
Student Web Site suggestions
Church Web Site suggestions
HTML colors and Hexadecimal numbers
Usability
suggestions for any non-profit organization with a volunteer
web master.
You might also like the essay,
My Adventures as a UU Web Master,
a talk I gave to my church about being their web master.