Theres a few thing that is goign to affect the design you wish your website to have:
Basically what kind of website will it be, what are you trying to demo
What are the features you wish to build in (RSS feeds)
And what is your target Audience, for instance if you are trying to show off a corporate website its not a good idea to have a whole gallery of pictures on your main startup page.
Also Websites don't get designed in ASP.NET / Visual Studio, they get designed in Photoshop/Fireworks ect (choose your poison)
I for one use photoshop and this web page
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-greatest-web-interface-design-tutorials-photoshop-tutorial/[
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Has been my saving grace for a long time (also it helped me understand Photoshop.
The best layout of corporate websites are Web 2 layouts,
where your features are neatly grouped
Your text is easily readable (Arial 12px 16px , 18px) color #CCC to #999
Also it should be easy for your clients to find info quick access to links like contact us/ finding us/ Products should be very easy to find.
In the last few years I found that clients generally prefer usability over bling(getting your page to load in 1 to 3 seconds flat) is far more impressive than having a page that loads in 15 seconds and has open closing animations with bells and whistles. So optimization get your Photoshop images to as small as possible, use css files and turn off the debug=true on the web.config.
Hope this helps
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