I have designed a few web apps for personal use, but I do freelance design (bleikamp.com/work) and $300 would maybe get you 1 mockup from a decent designer - no

I have designed a few web apps for personal use, but I do freelance design (bleikamp.com/work) and $300 would maybe get you 1 mockup from a decent designer - no XHTML/CSS or integration work. I generally charge $75/hr for design and XHTML/CSS work - so not cheap, but also not nearly as high a rate as the rate as the "rockstar" designers out there ($150+/hr) or a design agency (a hell of a lot/hr) A full design could take anywhere from 40-100 hours, maybe more - it's hard to know, it depends how many individual pages you have or how many unique designs are needed. Also make sure you know whether the designer includes a logo in his quote - many web designers / usability specialists aren't very good at logo work. If you want a designer to do the XHTML/CSS with the design, check out the code they have written in the past - a lot of people suck at XHTML/CSS, even with how simple it is compared to OOP...