Tip 1: Pick somewhere nice to live
Nothing is worse than building a house in your starting location if you aren't really happy with your starting location. There might be a lot of limiting factors that keep you rooted to one place in the beginning of the game, but if you don't find ways to overcome them, you will soon find yourself wanting to start over after you've gotten your haul of diamonds and nothing can kill you anymore. Ideally you want to find your diamonds and still have things to build, and you want them to look nice. Don't begrudgingly stay in that ugly tundra or swamp because that's where the seed made you start. You could find greener pastures with nice terrain features to be exploited. Build castles in the fields and wizardly towers jutting out of the mountaintops.
Tip 2: Don't confine yourself to one building; Spread out
The route most people will take is to build a starting shelter and then continually expand it or cram things into it. It starts off as a one-room house with just a bed, furnace, crafting table and chest but soon becomes cramped as they pile more chests and furnaces into it. Or perhaps a cramped basement is dug underneath the house. The basement has a few chests in it, and bookshelves with an enchanting table and brewing stand. And there's a staircase from the basement into a branch mine. And another staircase to a room with the Nether portal in it (conveniently out of audible range from everything else). Eventually all player activity becomes centered around one small area, and things become boring. If you build multiple buildings, each with a specific purpose, there's more time spent being creative and using lots of styles and colors for each building… Instead of time spent digging more square rooms under the main house to hold more double-chests in.
Tip 4: Don't build too big
This one comes from personal experience. I once started a world with the intention to dig a MASSIVE quarry mine. The base of which would be 100x100 at layer 6, and that would slope upwards gently until it reached sea level. And then I would build a city on layer 6, in the pit. Needless to say, I never finished the pit. I never even got to start the city. Once I had dug a 100x20 room, after spending at least seven hours with iron pickaxes and stacks of gravel filling in lava pits, I decided to MCedit the rest. The result was me feeling unsatisfied having cheated to complete a task that no mortal should ever have attempted in the first place. I restarted the world soon after, finding no joy in my "accomplishment".
Tip 5: Don't build too sparsely or too densely
If you want to build multiple buildings, don't put them too far away from one another, or it will be a chore to travel between them all. But don't put too many buildings too close together, or you might feel a bit cramped or run out of room to build larger buildings.
