On question #2, HN has a monthly freelancer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304173 If you're willing

On question #2, HN has a monthly freelancer thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5304173 If you're willing to put in some effort to pursue an approach with low signal/noise-ratio, you could pick some random cities and post ads in Craigslist's gigs section, e.g. http://chicago.craigslist.org/web/ http://chicago.craigslist.org/web/. That will tend to get you a lot of small-time freelancers of varying quality, many of them art-school students and similar. If that's what you want you can get some great deals (at the cost of a lot of time spent filtering). If you're looking for more established design firms, rather than Craigslist you might just try web searches with a city name appended, for stuff like [st. louis web design firm]. Will also require a bit of filtering to find something you like, but from a different starting pool. Rates really vary, partly depending on what you mean by design. More technical designers who also do some coding tend to cost more, for example. Designers who have a good network and high visibility cost a lot more, especially anyone whose portfolio includes big-name web properties. Since the discovery problem is quite difficult (as you seem to be noticing), the price/quality curve is imo very inconsistent, with some great designers working cheaply because they don't have good networks or marketing, and some not-so-great ones charging a lot, because they're able to bring in so much work that they can get away with it.