When choosing to work with anyone you should look for skills which complement your own / your current teams. Generally when looking to recruit a designer, it w

When choosing to work with anyone you should look for skills which complement your own / your current teams. Generally when looking to recruit a designer, it would be their design skills your after; not their legal advice or ability to write in marketing jargon. Look for people whose designs you like, preferably who have produced something similar to the look you're after before. Find someone you can build a relationship with, where they can talk you through their subject in your language. If you're a small business with no technical skills, your "web designer" should be someone who describes the whole process of getting a site on-line up front, and who offers ways for you to maintain that site yourself, without having to pay them each time you want a few lines of text added. If you're a larger business, or a developer who lacks graphics skills, you'll probably be focussed on just the design side, and will want someone who uses technologies compatible with what's in your toolkit, people who have experience working alongside programmers, and perhaps those who understand how to optimise their designs for performance. Everyone's requirements are different, so the designer they're after will also be different. Look at what these designers have done before, and look at their customers' feedback, and pay particular attention to those customers who seem to be the most similar to yourself.