[lucideer]

This.

The doodle has character. The corporate illustration looks like it's either a component of an extremely generic free landing page template, or the product of a very jaded, overworked designer churning out rehashed versions of the same pastel vectors they took from an image stock site 5 times a day.

The rest of the bullets in the article are overused rules blindly followed over the years to ensure no website is differentiable from the last.

Above-the-fold is such a well-known myth it's been used for decades now by middle-managers with 5-minutes-reading-wikipedia design experience to bully designers and developers alike into cramming as much content into an artificial letterbox as possible.

Just pay a designer.

(If you genuinely can't, then use a template; it won't give you anything worse than following this article would)

[lbriner]

Exactly. Use your skills to maximise your revenue so you pay others to use their skills.

It is not clear whether we are talking purely about design or also the implementation, which can be another world of pain. I am a very experienced (mainly backend) developer but even some simple front-end tasks like understanding why something isn't aligning as expected take me a long time.

Just pay someone to deliver you the HTML or buy off-the-shelf. Nowadays, you can get something decent from somewhere like Envata for $20!