I think having somebody build a site in HTML and CSS is a waste of time. There has to be some knowledge of the space and I think almost everyone has the basic k

I think having somebody build a site in HTML and CSS is a waste of time. There has to be some knowledge of the space and I think almost everyone has the basic knowledge of what is a website now. You've mentioned one development process, but a lot of good shops are doing iterative development, extreme programming and - in particular - test driven development. The big hole I see here is scalability and distributed systems. This is a very technical topic, but the fact of the matter is if you are building a large scale web application it has to, well, scale. That means clusters of servers, managing memory across these servers (memcached perhaps), transactions, consistency all this stuff.