Back in the days I did a lot of web programming and web design, and man if I got to hate it. [A-D]HTML and browser compatibility issues? No thanks, I had my share of grief. So I always refused to spend more time on it, even if it was for myself. Until today. After all it can be handy for sharing information. I couldn't really be bothered to do anything complex, use some CMS or similar, nor I had intention to be compliant to the latest standard $omg_change_that_slash_or_you_will_go_to_hell. Still, I tried to do something decent, both from a technical point of view, using xhtml+css and avoiding WYSIWYG editors, and from the graphical one. Because let's be honest, useit.com is as usable as horrible. And my dear geek, don't give me your KISS to motivate your black on white pure text website: KISS means Keep It Simple Stupid, not Ugly.
I had in mind a few rules when I started this, which I'd like to share and receive comments about.
Here you go:

1. The eye wants its part: try to do something pleasing, don't crowd your pages with images, using lots of different colours and styles. Nor abuse minimalistic styles, that's how the most of us excuse laziness or carelessness.
2. Don't assault users with too much content, pages should be easy and quick to scan, offering an overview of whatever is available and with a bit of description. Despite design's advantages of a website stretching horizontally (works better with different resolutions,text size and so on) it tends to lose efficacy dispersing user's focus over a too broad area.
3. The homepage should always provide an introduction to the website, because unless it covers a very specific topic it's impossible, by posting articles and content directly on the homepage, to give a complete idea of the arguments covered.
4. Don't be too verbose.
5. Write content according to the reverse pyramid paradigm: mention and explain quickly the core ideas, then start developing them adding details as the pyramid grows toward its base. This saves a lot of time to users to find out if they are interested or not, and help to pass the piece of information to those that can't be bothered to read too much.
6. Don't use many different fonts, and be careful with different text sizes and weights too, even the same font is perceived differently by the human eye.
7. Many categories and sections should be avoided, complexity is your enemy, and menus should be kept simple and always visible in their entirety. Subsections should have their own menu and not be sub-menus of the parent menu item.
8. Use tags, they are a very nice way to organise content
9. Every article should offer a "Related stories" list: it's a very nice service to provide because it helps users finding things they can be interested into
10. Dent be afraid of using bigger fonts, they help readability
11. Try to avoid using light color fonts on dark backgrounds, *cough* I know *cough* :)
12. Make it easy to download/save/print the page/website, avoid lots of javascript, possibly provide a css for media print, and if you have the chance, the page in simple text and the whole "section" as a zip file availabe for download are a big plus
13. Splitting articles on multiple pages is annoying. Maybe it had a sense back on the 56k modems's days, but now I really fail to see the advantages. Multiple pages make saving/copying text annoying, the article doesn't get short or easier to read, it takes additional clicks to get to the other pages and searching the article for a word is harder. My only explanation? Hits! They are not trying to make your browsing experience better, just showing you more banners.