I look at sites around the web and try to get ideas from them. I get inspiration from different places but I really like templatemonster.com. They have quite a few impressive template designs for all sorts of different categories of business and interests. Lately, you see a lot of sliders on web sites. I found an impressive one on PartyPoker.com that not only slides left and right but also each pane scrolls up when you hover over it. Another nice thing they do is that they make the main navigation HTML text so that it can be translated. I use Google Chrome so it gives me the option.
Another site I go to for inspiration is Creattica.com. They have a wide range of designs. Book covers, brochures, Flash web sites, icon design, logos, architecture, posters, T-Shirt design and more. Creattica is in the Envato family of web sites that include Net-TutsPlus, WebDesign-TutsPlus and Mobile-TutsPlus among others. All these sites have great tutorials on web site design and coding.
Using StumbleUpon I came across this cool web site. The silver balls float around and reflect the buildings and the sky around them. you can move your mouse and it will rotate the scene and move you through the balls. It doesn’t have much to do with web site design per se but I thought it was pretty cool! 🙂
In short, there are quite a few sites that you can get inspiration from. I’ll typically take screen shots of sites that I like or elements of them and save them in an ‘Inspiration’ folder that I can look to when I need ideas for web sites, banner ads, etc.