Can anyone recommend some good books on designing an eyecatching website? I am a complete novice. I am also interested in home business tax information that a layperson can understand. I have always done my own taxes but, this is an entirely new concept.

I think you can search in Google and get some very useful help and tutorials on designing an website. You can try reading their pages and I am sure it will be then a matter of few days to create the pages of your liking.

Books No No You dont want to do that,The reason is the internet is moving so fast,by the time someone has sat down and writen one its out of date.
I build websites and have never read a book (well not on design anyway)
The way I learnt was to down load a free web template and just play around with it,If your a novice start with html and leave php alone for a while.
Do a simple google search for "free web templates" and go from there!

Hope this helps
Mark