If you're looking for someone to design a site for you, or perhaps to just get something up and running in a way that you can take over and do more of the design yourself, as you gain experience.

Then why not contact someone who has been through the mill and can help you get started, at the right price.

That's what I did... a friend helped me get started and I learned from there. Thank you Bob Howe.
By getting Bob to do an initial four or five pages for me, I was able to study how he went about it and, using his pages as templates, I was able to re-hash these to create new pages. This shortened my initial learning curve by as much as several month, I would say. Gradually, I learned more and more until I was even creating on-line shopping carts.

Anyone who has battled with web pages that build in front of their eyes while they wait and wait. Or, have lost their train of thought while adverts leap around the pages, they are trying to read and understand.
Anyone who has experienced these and the myriads of other distractions "available", to the point that they cannot find what they are looking for have, no doubt, as I have, promised that if they had a web site, it would not drive their potential and existing clients to the point of quitting.

Well, you do not have to cause others anxiety such as this - there is an answer - the term "keep it simple" comes to mind.

Do you sometimes feel like the target of the ultimate WEB joke but cannot laugh because you do not understand it?

I felt like that too. Then I learned a little and then a little more and, after working with my own sites for a while, I then took a look at some of the source files of these very professional sites and found most to be full of errors.
Suddenly I realised that, had I gone down that road, I could have paid a fortune for these errors and probably, quite rightly so. After all, they were very complicated errors; ones that only an experienced "professional" could make.

"Two basic principles, of good business"

Have you noticed the modern trend? You buy a product and then start paying the supplier to fix the problems.

I can't work out if the supplier is just ignorant to the principles of fair trading or if this system, simply guarantees that they become very rich, at our expense.

Well, I certainly do not like this modern "Business Technique" and refuse to pretend, that I offer anything more than I do (probably limiting my own pot of gold but, at least I feel good).