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A couple of good books to read too: 1) Don't make me think 2) Designing interfaces (by Tidwell) 3) Defensive design for the web Anyone have additional books that they've read?
Read A List Apart's articles, it's dedicated to people who make websites. This is, "A Guide for New Readers": http://alistapart.com/articles/ALAprimer
1. start with tutorials or poking at an existing design until it does what you want; learn the fundamentals of html and css from a dummies-level book or tutorials
2. find motifs or patterns you like, and reverse engineer (i.e. steal) them: specifically, start with a canvas with the original image on the left and try to create it from scratch on the right
3. repeat 2 until you have a toolkit of techniques (e.g. web 2.0 motifs like gradients, rounded corners, patterned backgrounds, reflections, all that cliched shit :)) and can put together things from scratch
4. integrate more formal theory (graphic design books, typography, photoshop/illustrator technique, web design books, etc.)
your first few designs will suck, but you'll get better :) but definitely learn by doing.
There's a bit of a learning curve, but Firebug seriously changed the way I design and code.
Other than that, do what you'd do to learn any other creative skill -- find examples that you love, and dissect them. Figure out exactly what it is that turns you on and incorporate those details in your own work. Good luck!
Expertise in any artistic en devour, whether it be painting or chess is best learned by studying the masters. So find the website designs you like and take the time to try recreating them. If you need an design application I recommend the GIMP.
I've often wondered how much of the explosion in web creativity can be attributed to the transparency of HTML -- you can "view source" any page and find out exactly how the designer created that cool effect. By comparison, Flash is opaque. Yes, there are tools that let you dig in to the ActionScript and whatnot, but you don't have the immediacy of seeing it right there in your browser.
You can bootstrap some of those by starting out with someone elses attractive, nicely implemented templates, but you'll still need some sense of typography, usability & CSS/HTML skills to adapt them to your own app/site.
So sayeth Jeffrey Zeldman:
Information architecture. Usability. Accessibility. Web standards. If you don't know about these things, stop designing websites until you have learned. Competence in graphic design is merely a baseline; it does not qualify you to create user experiences for the web.
Every time I think I can stop talking about these obvious, simple truths, some crazy bad 90s style train wreck hits me headlong and makes me weep anew.