I'd certainly agree that getting a professional web designer involved is a very good idea (I remember my attempts to fix our toilet last time it broke), and I think my site has benefited from that - I spent some time in the planning stage with the design company sorting out the presentation, and perhaps more importantly what I wanted to achieve with the site.
My feeling was that I didn't expect a flood of business solely from the web but that it would be a kind of glorified business card for me; I also wanted something that was simple, reasonably elegant and fast-loading - viewable with a wide range of resolutions and browsers. I've had some criticism that the site is not completely 800x600-friendly, and though I may look at this again eventually, for the moment I'm comfortable that the majority of content (including all the text) is visible at that res. without scrolling.
In my case, as I occasionally write about audio I wanted the text to be particularly 'tight', especially in those sections where there would be little change over time such as the 'Mastering' page, which attempts to answer some common questions. I therefore put a fair amount of effort into the textual content and I'm reasonably happy with the results - when I look at other people's efforts it's not unusual to see 'flab' and redundancy in the writing, probably not unlike this post!
The other thing I'd say is that from the start I wanted to be able to change and update things remotely from home, and the solution the designer identified was to use Nvu (
www.nvu.com), a very good WYSIWYG web editor which also happens to be free - it'll suit both a complete web novice like me and also someone who wants to roll up their HTML sleeves. This has enabled me to tidy a few things and add a basic News page for example, while still working within the framework that was set for me. I hope to regularly update the picture content as well since I live and work in a pretty location and use pics of the local countryside as part of my 'angle' for the site.