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last week i ordered a logo from a contractor on odesk and 24 hours later costing us 44 dollars, i got a logo for my new startup.

And your logo looks like a $44/24hr logo. It's unbalanced, uses simple stock colors, stock fonts and was probably tossed together in a matter of minutes. It looks like something a professional design firm would whip up internally as a way to start building mood boards and ideas to build off of.

this logo would cost me hundreds of dollars going the normal path and will take forever.

No it wouldn't. If you're typically paying hundreds of dollars for something that looks like this you're either very bad at writing a branding/logo/identity brief or you're hiring the wrong people.

there is a never ending stream of ... horror stories about odesk.

And your story is now one of them.

My wife, who has a solid head for mathematics but majored in German once explained to me why she didn't go into engineering: 1) because she didn't want to be surrounded by dudes all day; 2) because she didn't want to enter a field where she wouldn't have women bosses and mentors.

Then her own prejudice is keeping her out of engineering. That’s not the fault of the men in that field, that's all on her.

Also, you say she has a "solid head for mathematics" but instead majored in German. Again, that was her choice and this may be why many women don't go into technical fields: they simply choose not to (regardless of their abilities).

As someone who is a designer/developer who also runs several successful e-commerce websites here are my 2 cents:

Stay away from sites like 99designs and other low budget crowdsourcing sites as they only attract low quality designers who tend not to know much about UX, conversions, usability, perception, etc.

If this project is serious enough for you to quit your job then you really need to make sure your design is going to be flexible enough to accommodate all of the changes you may need to make in order to increase conversions as you begin to acquire customers and analyze data.

Here is my suggestion: the designer should create a design that fits within a CSS grid framework like 960.gs, Blueprint or the Less Framework. The designer can also create their own grid and you can generate the CSS using several online CSS grid builders like the 1kb grid.

Then figure out how many UNIQUE page templates you will actually need (things like a home page, a pricing page, a general inner page that can also double as a blog page - if designed correctly, and a signup page - it's very important to have a flexible signup page that you can easily make changes to).

Most likely you will be re-using elements like headings, paragraphs, sidebars, menus, buttons and lists throughout your site. You can use the CSS grid to build multiple layouts for different page templates or sub-page templates and then reuse the elements and their styles for the content of those pages.

If you need help get in touch. We do a lot of design and dev work for startups and this sort of thing (flexible interface design at a reasonable price) is something we do all the time. Heck, we may even build the templates using HTML and CSS right in the browser and skip the PSD files altogether!

My website is on my profile page. Our pricing is very reasonable and we're located in the U.S. - Detroit, Michigan to be exact.

Here's my outsourcing story:

I run a busy web dev firm in the USA and we needed a way to speed up our project time lines while still maintaing high quality. The easiest way for us to do this was to outsource the front end code so we could concentrate on design, usability, marketing and back end development.

You would think that outsourcing HTML/CSS would be fairly easy. Turns out that many of the companies offering front end coding (from a layered PSD file) have no clue what they are doing. In fact, there were times we provided them with a complete, highly detailed spec and even wrote some of the markup for them and they STILL managed to screw it up.

We tried several different firms before we found one that actually knew what they were doing and would adhere to our specs. Now that we've been working with them for about a year they understand what we need and can consistently deliver quality work.

Just a quick note about the cost: they were a bit more expensive than the other firms we dealt with but I'll gladly pay a bit more if the work can be done right the first time :)

BTW - the company we work with is called XHTMLized I highly recommend them for front end code.

My company does UI/Design and usability testing for developers (as well as development for designers/ad agencies).

Although I tend to work more on the development side of things I can tell you that finding competent, knowledgeable designers who understand how to create usable interfaces that will help increase conversion rates and still look appealing to the target market is no easy task.

We interviewed about 100 designers before we found a few that understood that design needs to support business objectives and solve business problems (like how do we get more sign-ups directly from our home page?)

Many of the designers out there are simply focused on making websites/interfaces that look good but don't actually support business objectives or customer needs.

The best designers take a problem solving approach instead of a purely aesthetic one. So when interviewing them be sure to ask plenty of "problem solving" type questions. This will help you weed out the "artsy" types from the serious designers.

One more piece of advice: stay away from sites like 99designs etc since the only designers on there seem to be ones who are just starting out and have very little experience solving real world problems. 99Designs may be great for small mom and pop outfits (think local deli, florist, etc) but it doesn't work well for serious start ups that will need to launch with an interface optimized for conversions.

If you are looking for a rock solid design team that also understands the development process, give me a shout. We're currently wrapping up some work for another incubator.

We use the exact same 2 hosting companies. I can't say enough good things about Linode :)

I think that HTML5/CSS3 may bring back the days of useless animations, horrible text effects, and web pages plagued by usability problems due to the implementation of "features" for the sake of novelty that we had the "pleasure" experiencing in the 1990's.

I'm looking at all those novices out there that use Expression/FrontPage/Dreamweaver as their environment of choice for writing HTML once those WYSIWYG tools begin to incorporate HTML5/CSS3 into their toolkits.

The rest of us will make good use of these new features and only implement them when it makes sense. Sadly, many unprofessional elements within the web design community will be all too eager to show off their newfound "sKiLLz".

Just my 2 cents - I help run a company that sell products to middle America (soccer moms, dads, kids etc) and the only advertising that has paid off for us has been timely relevant advertising (Google, Yahoo, etc). We tried Facebook, banner ads, etc with no luck.

We also started our own affiliate program (every customer automatically becomes an affiliate) and trained our customers how to refer their friends and family to us. That has paid off better than buying ads space on blogs or news sites.

There may be some types of ads that do very well as banners on general news sites (I'm thinking of those weight loss and bad breath ads) but it hasn't worked out for us at all. It all depends on your market, the people who visit the sites you advertise on as well the information contained in your actual ad.