Not only is it unrealistic to expect a typical designer to be a good programmer, it’s usually not a good idea even if you happen to find the rare individual with a grasp of both. (I know both areas well; for me, learning design, printing and programming has been a 25-year process!) Why’s this?

Because any website with any significant complexity has many, many pieces. It’s much more efficient to split up the load in a team and let people specialize their thinking / working processes, they can work smoothly and with fewer ‘context switches’: the process of mentally changing gears to cope with a greatly different task.

In a one-person show, all of the context switches happen to the same individual; they are alone in a project, which is isolating and demoralizing no matter how cool the project; and they have a whole lot of work to do without the prospect of relief. These factors are additive and the net drag is enough to stall many projects.

The solution: have one or more developers, and one or more designers. No less.