Well first off, CSS and design are related by they are not the same thing. You could be the best CSS guru out there, and still not know how to design.
Don't believe what 37 Signals say, if you skip the Photoshop step in the design process then you will end up with crappy looking designs, and most likely, badly functioning ones as well.
If you do hire a designer you should know that there are really two different classes of design when it comes to the web.
First off, there is the normal web designer guys. If you are looking for quality 99 Designs is not the place to go, but it is where a lot of people end up anyways. Go there is you want them to just rip somebody else's design off or use a cookie-cutter template with a few modifications because that is all you are paying them to do and they do not care much for quality. It is a volume business.
A great website designer will run you around $50-75 per hour. D don't expect to get a great website for less than $5,000 if it is a small one and $15,000 if it is medium sized. Good design takes a lot of time and iteration.
The second class of designers are interface designers. While web designers care about the marketing of a product, interface designers care about the functionality of the product and how to make it easy to use. Just because you are good at one doesn't mean you will be good at the other.
Interface designers are rare and go for $100+ an hour if they are really good. The most I have charged for a job doing interface design is $225, but it averages at around $100.
I agree with most of your points, except that you can't skip photoshop.
Depending on your skill levels in various tools, it might be way better to simply start into html + css. I know a couple designer/developers who can go from an idea to visuals dramatically faster in code than they could using photoshop (myself included). Additionally, you get the advantage of being able to style simply effects in right away (ie, hover states, focus states, etc) instead of having to create extra layers or version of a PS file.
Sure, if you don't know Photoshop very well then you could code it faster. Except you will end up with sloppier code and a weaker design.
It is the equivalent of building a house without blueprints. You can do it, but if you take the time to plan things out before you break ground you will end up with a stronger product.
Now, if you already have a design style locked down and code you can just puzzle together then sure, go ahead and skip Photoshop. I do that as well. But, as soon as I need to design a new UI element I am back in Photoshop making dozens of variations.
I understand your general gist... but I find sketching the design by pencil and paper much faster than photoshop - obviously I don't get pixel perfect results, but the intricacies of CSS mean that it's difficult to match a photoshop design pixel-by-pixel anyway. I agree that it's much better to have a visual plan in place first, but photoshop would definitely slow me down, and I've designed dozens of web sites.
Pen and paper should be used as a tool to help in the thinking process, but it is not a replacement for real computer mockups.
Sketching doesn't give you a realistic sense of space and feel for web design. Very often you can sketch something that looks good on paper, but once you put it on the screen it just doesn't translate well to a pixel medium.
Sketching is great if you are working with a physical medium like brochures or posters though. Then it doesn't suffer from the same translation cost.
It depends a lot on where you're iterating. If you're iterating concepts and structure, sketches work perfectly. If you're iterating the size of a shadow, the exact color pallet, the exact shape of a logo then you'd better be in Photoshop.
For all 37s likes to talk about not using Photoshop they don't have pixel-perfect design at all and yet still had somebody slaving over Adobe products while putting those logos together.
Maybe the goal of working in Photoshop isn't to mimic the design pixel-by-pixel, but instead to "sketch."
Mocking things up in Photoshop can be really productive because everything you sketch (all of your background images, buttons, and art) can be used as an asset on your site with minimal effort.
I think what unavoidable is saying is that photoshop, specifically, isn't a necessary step. Personally, I hate mockups in it. I try to use paper and pencil, if it needs to be formal, I use balsamiq.
I do agree that you need SOME sort of mockup, but I actually think low res mockups are more effective because people aren't distracted by the fact that an underlined link in PS doesn't quite look right.
web designers absolutely should use photoshop, because they are essentially providing the "theme" around the wireframe, that may be designed by the UI designer.
It depends on the specific design. If it's wordy and document-like (eg: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/) then it may be better to bypass Photoshop and start writing the HTML/CSS, since Photoshop is ill-suited for mocking up those kinds of designs.
On the other hand, if it's more graphical (eg: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop) then I'd agree that Photoshop is absolutely necessary.
And no, I still disagree slightly. It's not about the kind of design the final product is, it's about what function your role is fulfilling. Are you designing the way the people interact with the application, the way the application looks and feels, or both?
> don't expect to get a great website for less than $5,000 if it is a small one and $15,000 if it is medium sized. Good design takes a lot of time and iteration.
This is totally true, I paid $12,000 for a top of the line design on a site ~5 years ago, but that was after the business was already profitable and the better design/domain/branding would pay for itself. If you're not profitable, funded, or growing really rapidly, just get a functional CMS and a functional, decent design to start. The better design will help later, but it's the wrong place to put your resources if you have no users and no money.
Edit: Wordpress is totally decent and more versatile than people think. I was introduced to GetSimple recently by Yifei Zhang, it's open source and it looks pretty decent out of the box. http://get-simple.info/
Edit2: Also depends on what your business or app is. Share more details? Maybe a link if you have a rough version somewhere?
you know, if I am at that point, I just go buy a template and am done with it. at least a good portion of the templates, on reputable sites, have clean code underneath them. I saw some work from a 99 gig and it was the most atrocious thrown together, to save time, job I have ever seen.
Sometimes you need cheap and fast, I am of the opinion that when you do, it is better to adapt to a purchased template than to try to fix slop code from 99.
I use http://themeforest.net/ when I need a template for a throw together site. Most of the ones I have purchased have been well organized and their prices are better than some of the other sites. The down side is that they do not seem to have as extensive of a collection as some of the other sites. That being said, I have never seen a template on their site that looks like it was meant for geo-cities or myspace either, so that could account for the fewer templates.
I want to second the point about not skipping the photoshop/fireworks/illustrator/etc. step like 37 signals does. The reason they are able to do it is that they have already established a fixed set of agreed upon design patterns that appear in their apps.
If you skip directly to css and html, it's very difficult to think like a designer because you feel all the constraints of css and html. You'll think things like "oh, yes, I'll put a 5px border here and make it have 5px margin from the element above because it's easy" instead of "wow, this block would be interesting if it overlaid the top block".
In photoshop, it's easy to experiment visually by moving around blocks. In CSS and HTML, it's a pain. (Although, tools like firebug and web inspector have made certain things easier, not all of it is).
If your website is more like an application, think of gmail, then a framework like cappuccino (http://cappuccino.org/) come with pretty good design defaults. And no css/photoshop skills required. It will require learning obctive-j and a couple of cocoa though.
The one you linked, is a design of a blog. (That problem has already been solved, and it's a memorized pattern.)
Try designing the entire UX of a web application, from idea (how about we do X ...) to every single case, directly in HTML and CSS. Designing for GUIs it's more difficult when you don't have direct visual feedback.
(I do this from time to time, but only for very simple things.)
Don't believe what 37 Signals say, if you skip the Photoshop step in the design process then you will end up with crappy looking designs, and most likely, badly functioning ones as well.
If you do hire a designer you should know that there are really two different classes of design when it comes to the web.
First off, there is the normal web designer guys. If you are looking for quality 99 Designs is not the place to go, but it is where a lot of people end up anyways. Go there is you want them to just rip somebody else's design off or use a cookie-cutter template with a few modifications because that is all you are paying them to do and they do not care much for quality. It is a volume business.
A great website designer will run you around $50-75 per hour. D don't expect to get a great website for less than $5,000 if it is a small one and $15,000 if it is medium sized. Good design takes a lot of time and iteration.
The second class of designers are interface designers. While web designers care about the marketing of a product, interface designers care about the functionality of the product and how to make it easy to use. Just because you are good at one doesn't mean you will be good at the other.
Interface designers are rare and go for $100+ an hour if they are really good. The most I have charged for a job doing interface design is $225, but it averages at around $100.