To me, a web design expert needs intuition about usability, an eye for graphic design, and the skills to use photoshop to create mockups and then turn them into

To me, a web design expert needs intuition about usability, an eye for graphic design, and the skills to use photoshop to create mockups and then turn them into clean and robust CSS & HTML. You can bootstrap some of those by starting out with someone elses attractive, nicely implemented templates, but you'll still need some sense of typography, usability & CSS/HTML skills to adapt them to your own app/site.