Check out their prior work... Is it impressive or the same dull stuff everyone else has. Is the work easily modified at a later date. It might not seem necessary at first, but you might want to change your pictures each week to provide variety... or see which ones have the best draw. Does he or she charge you one time or is it an ongoing fee each month. Can you get the features you want... I ask this because I can go to 1000 different sites and I see the same design at 90% of them. I have seen only about 20-30 sites that I would enjoy going back too. Can you have a calendar or a blog? I could go on... Drop me a line... I will try to answer any questions you might have. I am not a designer myself but after doing incall at a Holiday Inn Express I play one on my own site.

What kind of site are you after? Is it just a static page that won't change often, or will you want a swanky calendar or contact form / mailing list or automated picture uploader?

For simple sites that won't get updated much at all, you could get a good deal commissioning a local college student. Once you start it with someone, try to stick with them for future updates (and let them know you'll stick when them for updates). That'll help prevent beautiful sites with disastrous HTML back ends. Ask for portfolios, those sites should still be alive.

The firm I used to work for charged $75 / hour for web design work. I believe this was for updates that needed rework, like new pages on the same site or new pictures that had to be 'shopped to fit or be placed right. Most update requests were taken care of in 4 hours or less. Start-up projects were usually quoted a lump sum and kept secret from the likes of me so I didn't run off and take work out from under them! When you get an estimate, see if they can offer a few different design ideas and let you pick one.

Expect complicated sites that need programming work to be more expensive and require a design phase AND a development phase. But that should go without saying.

Then again, the dirty little secret is that it's really not that hard IF you're willing to put effort into learning. I'd recommend w3schools.com for free tutorials that should cover everything a simple site would ever need. I guess it comes down to which you have more of: time or money.

Here's what I did the last time I had my site designed, I looked up alot of ladie's sites & saw who did the ones I liked the most. There is usually a link on the site somewhere to the designer. Good Luck!

Sara