I'm looking for a book on good web design if anyone has any recommendations? I can normally tell a good design if I see one but struggle to create my own, so looking for something that will provide some clarity on how to go about building good, clean designs.

I don't want to sound precious here, especially as I'm not a designer, but if it doesn't come naturally to you you will never be a good designer and will be constantly frustrated with the results of your attempts. The best thing you can do is to find a few examples of things you like, work out what it is you like about them and regurgitate.

To be honest, as the web moves fairly quickly, I find most books I've bought to become out of date and irrelevant within a few months. Probably best to find websites that offer web design and building tips.

I've found many useful articles on Speckyboy Design Magazine [ http://speckyboy.com ] for example, many have links to free downloads of useful code and scripts (jQuery, CSS, HTML5, etc) and ready made templates that you can pick up and adapt to suit your needs. Here's this week's round-up of stuff...
http://speckyboy.com/2012/10/30/weekly- ... ies-n-156/

Also, part of the same group as Speckyboy, there's Smashing Magazine [ http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ ] which is perhaps less web-orientated but there's still lots of web stuff on there, much of it more focussed on the design side rather than the building.

Books are useful for getting inspiration on the design, but too often designers focus too much on the design side rather than thinking about how it's built and what technologies to use. I'm as guilty as the next designer of that, but certainly in the last year or two I've had to get my hands dirty trying to understand the coding side too, and I'd say that makes you a better web designer as a result. The buzz words at the moment seem to be responsive websites, where the content scales intelligently to fit different screen sizes and devices like smart phones and tablets. You probably need to decide the basics first and then your designs might be influenced by those decisions. jQuery is also very popular too, due to it being more compatible with smart phones and tablets, as well as conventional web-enabled devices. For example, it can sometimes replace content that used to be done in Flash. With any luck, a combination of jQuery and HTML5 will eventually kill off Flash - I hope.

The thing I find interesting about designing content for mobile devices is that mobile devices have been continuously striving to be able to show normal websites properly and they've mostly achieved it. More often I find myself annoyed that I'm on the mobile site rather than the full site.

Consequently, I don't build for mobiles unless specifically asked. And even then I will say why I think it's unnecessary, even if I could make a few quid out of it.

Edit: just re-read your post properly and seen what you meant. Yes, rather than specific designs for different devices, designs that can be somewhat fluid.

Yes, the best way to illustrate what responsive web design is about, is to get one up on your desktop Mac/PC and then pull the window in to a smaller size.

The CSS and jQuery do some wonderful resizing tricks and you'll get to a point where it pings to the next size and layout. the good thing is, when it's done well, it's transparent to the end user but you're delivering content that's more suitable for smaller screen sizes - the graphics served can be smaller in file size too so that helps on smart phones and tablets on 3G connections for example. Smaller graphics mean less data on your 3G connection.

Here's some examples of Wordpress templates:
http://speckyboy.com/2012/10/25/10-free ... ss-themes/
(click the "Demo" buttons on your Mac/PC and then try pulling in the browser window size)

And some jQuery templates/plugins, many are responsive:
http://speckyboy.com/2012/09/17/20-new- ... a-look-at/