[curiousgeorge]

> I've seen a lot of great "website designs" done in Photoshop that wouldn't make terrible websites due to load speed, structure, or other unconsidered elements.

Agree. We've had designers deliver good looking stuff to us that ended up being unusable because they put a lot of time into delivering what they thought we needed instead of just reading the instructions. Tech knowledge helps eliminate communication problems.

The approach that works for me is keeping things simple and only adding graphic detail when it improves the look of the service. It helps to give developers examples of existing graphics to work with when you want a certain look. When you're looking for something very, very specific you can get an outside designer to put things together. I'd be surprised if you don't get responses from this post.