I'm a designer who learned Django and launched her first webapp in 6 weeks
The following really surprised me coming from a designer:
Build the web app first, then design it.It was tempting to build the entire interface first but I deliberately ignored the design until I had things 90% working. This got me to constantly work on the code before working on the "fun stuff", plus encouraged me to launch quickly since as soon as the code was finished, all I had to do was quickly "skin" it before getting it live with the assumption that I would be iterating on the design after it launches. Also, if I needed to abandon the project due to some insurmountable code problem, the time wasted wouldn’t include the time spent on design.I'm impressed that the site looks so good, with design being skinned on afterwards.  Was it literally just divs, spans, and lists, and then you did the CSS in one fell swoop (well one fell-iterative swoop)?