Great advice, thanks!
On the skillset note, having never worked very closely with real web designers, what should be my expectations? Is it realistic to be looking for someone who's both artistically capable and is great at the technologies you mentioned?
We can generally take care of anything on the front-end that's code related, but we basically don't have a good sense of aesthetics, color, style and so on. If you can draw something, we can most likely stitch it together on the site/app/whatever.