Design and Layout preference.... ?

[autocrat]

OK, heres a quick question for you designers or aspiring designers...

What are "your" preferences to an ideal site, both design wise, and layout wise. By design, I refer to colours, images, affects, scripting, codes, finishing touches and added extras....by layout I mean centralised, hard left, flowing/liquid, coloumned/boxed or break-out etc.?

Do you prefer the stereo typical and common colomn design, a more extravagant and flairful colomn design, something more graphical and flowing, something that spreads downwards in a pattern etc.

Just wondering what those who "do" prefer... as I'm noticing strong trends, and can't decide if it due to customer or designer... I have this aching feeling that a large number of DTP'rs got into WS Design, and the results speak volumes!
(nothing against DTP'rs, almost was one!, just not impressed wit hthe vast commoness of current design!).

Be interesting to see what you lot prefer.

[DaveSW]

I generally prefer 100% width with fixed width left menu.
You can look at some of the industry leaders in CSS based design on http://www.mezzoblue.com/ http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ & http://www.stopdesign.com/

[jtbnet]

Market is moving more towards Div and CSS layout as to apposed Tabled layout.

[roryt]

I would have t say the obvious answer. It depends what the client wants. I generally like colours to be quite bright but not obstructive. The page width is really based on how you want to place the content and how much needs to be there when the user looks at the page without scrolling. I do not use any formatting ie. fonts, width, colors in the html, atleast not any more. Column designs are cool as long as you have different content to go in each column. What I am trying to say is that everything or anything can look good if it is done well

[remiremi]

Your web site should be easy to read
Your web site should be easy to navigate
Your web site should be easy to find
Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site
Your web site should be quick to download