I think the best thing you can do is to keep it simple. Always ask yourself are you making it flashy for yourself, either because you're procrastinating or because you personally like the particular flash. And then ask yourself, does my audience care? Plenty of examples of "poorly" designed websites that dominated their market share. The users don't generally care.

To answer your question, I like to add a lot of placeholder text and images to all the columns and divs I plan on incorporating into the layout. When you are designing from scratch it's easy to say your color scheme or border choice looks bad, because it all looks too empty or scarce.

Start with the content first and use design to make it the content as accessible and efficient(UI) as possible, that's the most important thing IMO.