[trb]

Please don't be so harsh on the author.

She's not saying "this is going to be a professional design for your next project", the title itself contains "half-decent".

She's providing insightful tips for developers to make their pet projects look..like they're not designed by engineers (we do tend to make a mess of things).

And the advice she gives is perfectly fine for exactly that. There are fonts that look good together, subtly textured backgrounds do look better than simple, flat colored one's and using basic color theory upgrades a websites look (teal vs. orange, cough). Together, they make something that looks half-decent.

Just like the author claimed.