You've gotten lots of good techy info here, let me throw out some basic "web design skills" stuff...

4 major areas of concentration for website design:
Content (info your presenting)
Content organization
Navigation structure
Color Scheme & common graphics

Excellent reference book for the first 3 - Creating Commercial Web Pages by Laura Lemay. In fact this woman has a whole series of website design and graphic arts related books called the "Lemay's Web Workshop". She doesnt do heavy duty techy stuff, but rather heavy duty presentation stuff which can be real enlightening for true blue computer geeks like us who tend to gloss over the importance of good presentation .

For the last item, there's tons & tons of "browser safe color charts" out there on the web to use as a reference when mapping out a color scheme. Plus too, the Laura Lemay chick has an enhanced browser safe color chart out there somewhere with twice as many definitions to choose from.