I am in the same boat as the author. You can get a lot better at design by starting to look with a curious and critical eye at well designed web sites and things like movie posters.

I'm still not very good, but I'm able to put together nice sites with the help of Twitter Bootstrap and wrapbootstrap.com templates.

Here is an example of what a non-designer hacker can put together in a couple hours with a wrapbootstrap theme, icon finder and images from around the web:

http://willholloway.net