A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem. This is good advice. Embrace this, and you embrace Brutalist Web Design. Focus on your content and your visitors will enjoy you and your website. Focus on decoration or tricking your visitors into clicking ads, and your content will suffer, along with your visitors.
Some ideas David Bryant Copeland proposes in his Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design might sound a tad radical, but I do like the general concept, so I’m tempted to follow along.