Designing a website from scratch can be difficult, some days ideas can seem to be in short supply. When this happens to me I find the following 3 sites helpful for ideas and inspiration.

Inspiration from other designers

Not only is CSS Remix a nice looking site in it’s own right, it also features some of the best CSS based websites. Unlike some showcases it’s updated on a regular basis and you can choose to filter results by award (votes by users) or date added.

Tips, resources & ideas

Although Smashing Magazine does occasionally showcase websites, it also has regular features and articles on all sorts of web related topics. A recent highlight was 35 Designers x 5 Questions.

Inspiration from images

Searching stock image libraries by keywords can be a slightly different way to get ideas early on in a project, iStockphoto is one of the best and contains photographs, illustrations and graphics. It also comes in handy later on in projects when you need to source high quality images.