Ask HN: How can I improve the design of my websites? I'm bad at it

I think the websites from your Show HN submission look alright. https://www.refactoringui.com/ is a decent book with lots of examples (screenshots) and explains some basics on colors and layout.

For landing pages you can just buy a pre-made theme on http://themeforest.com

The Refactoring UI book is very good and explains in engineering terms a lot of designer best practises.

1) You can learn good design one strategy/approach at a time. Don't believe that people are born great designer or they aren't. One step at a time you can become better at design.

2) At the beginning don't try to reinvent the wheel but copy UX or designs from bigger more successful companies like for example Airbnb or some (non-competitor) product you like.

3) Never use pure black #000000 , in the real world pure black doesn't exist, there are very dark colors and some dark grays almost seem pure black but they are actually not.

4) Try to have things on the page in proportion to each other, if the top padding is 16px the other left/right/top should probably be 16px too or a multiple of 16px Some software like Figma make it easier to see the spacing between objects, that's how designer build beautifully proportioned things, they literally can see quickly the pixels amounts of spacing.

thanks for liking the look of my sites. i'll look into buying the book you mentioned in your comment.