The design of your website is very important and it is good that you are taking the time to think about the best approach to a good design. If you are not HTML and CSS savvy then my first recommendation would be to hire someone. Of course, hiring somebody is not always in the budget of a new business but if you can afford it, outsourcing this step is the way to go. There are many resources for finding a good designer. In the past I have used Elance.com to post a design project. If you decide to go with Elance.com just be sure to carefully screen the designer and make sure that they have a LOT of excellent feedback. Choosing the cheapest bid is not the way to go on Elance. You will end up getting burned.

Keep in mind that if you need a design for an eCommerce website you need to approach the project a little differently. First you will need to decide what shopping cart you are going to use. The most popular free shopping cart is osCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com/).  Having been in this business for  many years we have tried many. We started out with a Yahoo Store and when we grew out of that we moved to a solution called Miva Merchant. Recently I have become very dissatisfied with Miva and I am moving all new eCommerce sites to either osCommerce or X-Cart (http://www.x-cart.com). I haven't decided which one I like better yet. osCommerce is free but X-Cart is priced reasonably and comes with technical support. Both are customizable and there are lots of developers who work with both of these packages. Once you choose a shopping cart you can then find a designer who knows how to create designs for the shopping cart you have chosen. For example, if you went to Elance.com or RentACoder.com to find a designer you would mention in your project that you need a design for an osCommerce or X-Cart site. This information is very important to your designer.

Ok, so maybe you don't have the money to hire someone to design your website. Then What? Well, I have worked with many clients who couldn't afford a custom website. My recommendation is to purchase a template. You can purchase a template at a site such as http://www.templatemonster.com. The gotcha here is that you will need a few tools to edit these templates to work with your site. You are going to have to change the text and graphics to work for your website. The tool I use is Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Fireworks. If you don't have these tools and are not interested in putting some time into learning how to use them then I suggest you go back to option 1 — hire someone.

If you don't want to hire someone and you don't want to learn how to do it yourself then there is one more option and that is to go with what I like to call a Store-In-A-Box option. There are several excellent tools out there that will allow you to get an eCommerce store up and running VERY quickly. The one I started with was a Yahoo Store (now Yahoo Merchant Solutions). You may want to take a look at the answer to a previous question about creating an online store. The previously answered question was,  "How do I create an online store?"