As I would imagine in knife design, web page design requires certain restraint.
There's a ton of things you can do and include and show, what with fonts, colors, images, animations, sound, etc. etc. etc. We all remember when computers were coming of age and desktop publishing was all the buzz, people were turning out printed pages that looked like ransom notes.
IMHO, - the simpler, the better. When you navigate other's sites, undoubtedly you'll find things that turn you off.
Jakob Nielsen has a book out called, "Designing Web Useability" - Well done, lots of "before and afters" concerning web page design and web sites. This is money well spent, especially when you're just starting out doing the pages and have not committed yourself down an alley as yet that might be hard to change, if you wanted to change it.