Adam Keys has several tips for programmers, to make our web sites look better by keeping things simple. I often just use grayscale, too:
“Most important: design in greyscale. Color is hard and can lead to tinkering. My goal is to get in and out of the front-end bits quickly, so tinkering is the enemy. Greyscale is one dimensional, greatly simplifying matters. Give important information higher contrast and less important information or ‘chrome’ less contrast. Now you’re done thinking about color.”
These days I also start everything with Bootstrap, which adds great defaults for layout, buttons, and text. It makes everything looks better, right away. It’s not a replacement for a designer, but it does save hours (or days) of getting the basics up and running.
