Ask HN: What are some examples of really well designed websites?

It goes without saying, but good design does not equal good UX. A problem I have with places like Awwwards is that the sites they highlight look good from the screenshot, but navigating them and getting to the core intent isn't as easy as it should be. Most of these 'design inspiration' sites are really just people picking submissions from agencies and freelancers, rather than aggregating an honestly good list of sites that do their job.

Your best bet is to go through these types of sites and familiarize yourself with patterns that make it easy for you to understand what is going on. In addition to the siteinspire link posted by athesyn, I visit these every day (in order of how original the content is):

http://www.siiimple.com/ http://www.designfridge.co.uk/ http://www.colorgorize.com/ http://www.verynicesites.com/ http://www.webcreme.com/ http://bm.straightline.jp/ http://cssremix.com/ http://www.webdesign-inspiration.com/ http://land-book.com/

You'll see a lot of overlap, but again, that doesn't necessarily mean the site is well-designed. It generally just means that that designer was savvy enough to push the link out to all of these sites and it was passable enough to put on display.

Well designed for what? Design accomplishes a purpose, if there's a mismatch between the purpose and the design then the website can look nice but be poorly designed.

What do you want to accomplish?

http://siteinspire.com has a fairly decent collection of beautiful, clean, well-designed sites.

I like the way http://mcmaster.com has the online store set up.

I honestly think facebook is really well designed, shock horror but its true