That is encouraging. If folks with no previous design experience (assuming) can dish out beautiful html and css, that is indeed encouraging to the rest of us :) Any pointers to templates or design guides?
In at least one case (reddit), the founders had a great sense of design and yet chose to make the site sparse anyway. This was because as a news site they wanted to emphasize the information on the page and make the site itself fade into the background.
The design of ourdoings.com is relatively subtle, as most picture frames are, but back then it was even uglier than it is now. Nevertheless, people look at what they're interested in.