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.
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.