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):
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.
Those are a great set of links. I'm not a web designer but I do appreciate good design/UX when I see it. These links will help a lot with inspiration for learning.
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.
Well designed for what the website does. I'm a developer that is trying to get educated in design, so I'm trying to find examples of well designed sites. I want to look at these sites and figure out what it is about the design that makes the site work well. I just feel like understanding why something is well designed will help with my understanding of how to design.
This was on HN a few weeks back. I must say that I haven't gone through all of the lessons yet, but from what I have seen, it will help you grasp what makes good design.
Design is about trust and being able to do what you want to do without thinking. Facebook doesn't help users navigate to the places they don't want them to go to.
Readit News
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.
Edit: grammar
What do you want to accomplish?
http://hackdesign.org/