[Don Plumley]

I have a lot of experience working with mid and high-end interactive agencies. Any great designer can design a cool website with an intuitive navigation scheme. However, for this site to capture (visually) what is unique about your business and connect to your customers requires the type of creative brief, market understanding and design time that is well beyond simple web dev projects. Not even touching on content, photography and multi-language. It's pretty easy to spot the difference between a $10K website and a $100K website in seconds.

In other words, you want your designers not to design something that you think looks nice, you want them to design something that will engage and involve your customers. Superficially, you might like "blue", but your customers gravitate towards "purple" because everyone else's website is blue and blue makes them think about that big company that screwed everybody.

What Rob was saying is essentially this - there are some process steps and ways that you can take or you can pay an interactive agency to do this for you.

I could rant and on, but would be happy to chat with you (or anyone else) about how to get something done cheaply and professionally using your local resources.

Don