what's the best website design you've seen?

[dmcgibbo]

hey i am a student and don't have any time to do website design as a bio/psych double major but like dabbling in it. my website is at...
www.unc.edu/~dmcgibbo/
and it pretty much sucks but i did the nav bar in flash. what really good websites have you seen that i can model my site after? is there an easy way to get a really good looking site done for you or a template or something? my major problem is i dont know whether to do a thin thing down the center and put all my website in it or just start on the left of the window and have a banner/nav at the top or have a banner/nav at top and left side and then end the website on the right which looks weird on certain resolutions. any help/advice is greatly appreciated as well as criticism/comments about my website. haha i know its bad but i spent little time on it so...

[dmcgibbo]

for instance...
1) this site is UGLY how it just ends and the background doesn't continue. Everything is on left, bad nav and the page just cuts off in the center (at least for me on my resolution - it probably looks fine on like 800x600) www.dailytarheel.com

when you do a page background, you have to make it wide enough so it doesn't repeat but if you make it really wide, won't that make pages have a scroll bar if someone views ur site and its a low resolution? haha i use 1600x1200 res so everything is tiny

2) www.howardchui.com or www.cnet.com These are the everything in the center type of website which at least looks better but I don't know how i'd cram all of my website into it and i don't have ads and lots of tidbits and news so its hard to do this design unless you are good at webdesign

3) www.dpreview.com i kinda like this design and the navbar on the left. I'd also ad a bar across the top if i knew how to make it so that no matter what resolution it would extend to the edge like the ibm.com bar also stops in middle of page on higher resolutions and doesn't continue to edge but i guess that would look weird

Basically, I need a site to copy/model/learn from and can't find any that I like off-hand so any suggestions would be appreciated!

[tfung]

most of these websites are asp or php sites... if your server supports these scripts, you can pretty much just download a lot of templates online....

[glowrider]

Any info on where to find these templates?

[tfung]

can try this site and look under content management and portals

http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/

[Aussie2U]

I like this one. www.fargo.com

[polvoronn]

from a design standpoint, I really like a lot of the sites featured on www.coolhomepages.com. I also like www.optionsnowboards.com and a bunch of other snowboarding/skate companies (Ride, DC shoes, Transworld, Burton, etc).

[dmcgibbo]

i like some of those sites on coolhomepages but i hate that snowboard site - its cool but its hard to read, takes up the whole screen, and requires stuff that a lot of my page visitors wouldn't have installed

[Ben_FR]

Right now, I would say that the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill website is the coolest. It is very intuitive.

http://www.som.com/

[dmcgibbo]

see that site is cool and everything but i am looking for one that loads in a normal page and doesn't have all that stuff that slows down surfing if visitors have a slow connection or something....

[polvoronn]

Here's a website that I made a long time ago. The M5 page that it links to is something that I helped design for a friend of mine (I did the visuals, he did the literature).

http://labgroup7.cjb.net