What are other (better?) web design options?
One option for designing websites that has become popular in recent years is to have the design work and the web hosting done by the same company. This can work in some cases, particularly if you just need a simple website. However if you want something more complicated you are going to have to look into other web design options.
The first option that you have for web design is to do it yourself. This is actually a lot easier than a lot of people realize. There are literally thousands of templates out there that you can use to design your site. This is the cheapest option for getting a site designed but it is not usually the best way to go. There is a lot more to web design than making sure that the site looks good and you if you don't know what these are the templates are not going to help you much.
The other option that you have for designing a website is to hire a professional designer to do it for you. This is what you are going to have to do if you want to have a truly professional site. You have a couple of options in this regard. The first is to hire somebody who will both design the site and build it for you. This may or may not include the content of the site as well. You may have to provide them with content or they may write it for you. Having one person both design and build the site is the most common option for the simpler sites.
If you are building a site that is more complicated you may have to separate the jobs and have a designer do the design work and then have programmers actually create the site. This is more common on sites that have a lot of sophisticated features, particularly ones that need to be coded from scratch. The bigger sites will also require so much work that it will take a team to get them up and running anyway so the designer will be just one member of the team. You may find that the best option is to have a designer do the design and then build the site yourself.
Regardless of how you get your design work done it is important that you make sure that you hire a designer who knows what they are doing. A lot of people fancy themselves web designers because they have an artistic flair and they set themselves up in business. The problem is that there is a lot more to designing a website than simply how it looks. A good designer needs to understand things like navigation and good linking structures. Make sure that you stick to a designer who has experience and knows what they are doing.