I was on the phone today with one of my students and she said that her company paid $12,000 to someone to design their website!

This is ridiculous. Paying 12K for simple ‘brochure’ website is meaningless.
There are tons of content management software available for free. All you need to do is setup one and the most popular ones like Joomla or Drupal is usually available ‘built-in’ in your hosting account.

Web designing is not something special nowadays. If you are keen in getting a custom website designed, there are online places like Elance.com or Guru.com. Just write your requirements in plain English, post to one of these websites and top designers will fall in queue to get your website done. Most of the time, a website can be developed with as little as a few hundred dollars.

So, instead of spending your hard earned money on expensive designing, focus more on marketing and driving traffic to your website.