Striking a Balance
Design principals can be divided into two categories: what makes a site pretty, and what makes a site usable. Design trends and styles make sites look good, but they aren't always related to how a site functions, and can therefore be carefully disregarded. However, many of the basic principals of design are less about looking good and more about making sure a website is actually usable. Contrast, for example, is a critical element for ensuring that your text is actually readable, and therefore must be kept in mind when a website is being designed. Yale's School of Art website, being open for anyone to edit, had to take precautions in their website's design to ensure that everything was still readable. See, the site's background can be changed, but the text and fundamentals how how the site works cannot, and the reason for that is to ensure that no matter what the background becomes, the boxes that encase the text will stay the same color and keep contrast high. The following video talks a lot more about some of the most important aspects of design, with my own comments in the annotations, but in general, try to think about how your design choices affect your user. If someone is likely to be inconvenienced by the choice, it's probably a bad idea.
The biggest thing to remember when experimenting with design is that before you go live, you need to test it out. Bleier offers a very thorough guide to how to ensure that experimental web designs are functional (103-105), though I admit the programming side of it is a bit above my skill set. I do know the best test that your can run, though, and that's just to get a few members of your intended audience to interact with the website. They'll tell you what works and what doesn't, and so long as you've kept them in mind while designing things, it should turn out alright.
