Website Design: DIY or Designer?

Should you try to design your website yourself or hire someone to design it for you?

The answer to this question depends on a number of things:

Time allotment

How much time do you have to work on designing your website yourself? If you’ve got time, you may want to try some of the work yourself. If you’re limited with the time you can spend working on your site, you may want to consider hiring someone, but check with the designer as to when your site design process will begin. Most designers will probably already have projects on their calendars.
Budget boundaries

Sometimes it’s more expensive to hire a designer, but sometimes it may actually be cheaper. If you will need to rely on purchasing a template to install yourself, you’re already paying something. You will also be getting a site that will probably look almost exactly like the thousands of others who purchased the same template … which is okay if that doesn’t matter to you.
Previous knowledge or willingness to learn

Do you know how to “ftp” or send information to a server. Do you understand any HTML code at all or PHP. If so, you can probably design your site yourself. If you’ve never heard of ftp, HTML or PHP before, you’ll probably want to hire a designer.
Confidence in trying new things

Are you one of those people who are willing to try something new and are not afraid of making mistakes? Do you comprehend things easily after reading or watching a tutorial? If you feel pretty comfortable on the computer and don’t mind taking the time to learn some things, you might want to try designing your site yourself. If not, you’ll probably want to look for a designer.
Attention to detail

Are you really good at checking things twice? Writing a little code and re-writing files, uploading the correct ones, etc. requires thoroughness. If this sounds like you, then you may want to give your web design a try yourself.