If you want my opinion, design is not a "coat of paint" to be applied after the fact. User experience (UX) design should be baked into how you make your product.
So true ! Since the web came along, design has been hijacked by graphic designers - "coat of paint" - whilst important, its really just one part of design (perhaps the easiest) - UX is sooo much more.
Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. -- STEVE JOBS
I can do 100% of my UX/UI design in OmniGraffle and then implement it as black boxes on a white page and have a well thought-out easy to use site.
On the other hand, there are so many "pretty" sites that are really hard to interact with.
So, both are important - It seems to me that in the "web 2.0" world a pretty design will get press and get people in the door, and good UX is what will keep people using your site.
This is probably my favorite article on the topic: http://informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typogra...
It worked out really, really well for us; it may be worth your while to look outside typical web designers. That said, we already knew what the application flow would be like, so it was a matter of 'skinning' for us -- color scheme, iconography, etc.
Incidentally, we did get some proposals from other, more experienced web designers, but they all looked too formulaic and, er, web-site-ey.
dkokelley may have some good points, too.. It could've gone very wrong, especially if our site interaction was much more complicated (and surely someone else will think our design is a train wreck anyway ;) ), but I'm very glad that we took a chance on it.
In the end, the key was really that we were all just seeing the vision of what we wanted the same way.
And the site's artwork was designed by: http://nish.net
In my experience traditional print designers generally do not do a good job of creating a website design. They don't understand the deal with background images or what is and isn't possible, they prefer to use nonstandard fonts (easily fixed) and they typically don't understand what is and isn't possible with the technology being used.
Here's an example of what a print designer came up with for a website for a client of mine: http://cocunderground.com/fpt.jpg
The original designs looked best in my opinion, but the final (read, compromised) version can be seen at http://freepromotips.com
Also hiring freelance designers is very cheap and easy to do.