One of the concepts I found that has persisted is that Graphic Designers are Web Developers (Coding) and Web Developers are Designers. This seems to be a common view among many business acumen and the professionals them self.

The problem lies that many times when you receive your website you either have a great design with average coding or a average design with excellent coding. This does not even take into account if the coding is search engine friendly. Most of the time when you meet an exceptional Graphic Design he will have some sort of Art degree. This is a good thing, this means this person has formal training in design, color balancing and strong typography (fonts) skills. Rarely I will find a very competent programmer in this same person that can code their design into a fully functional website.

When you meet a strong coder that has knowledge in Apache (Linux) and IIS (Windows) administration, CSS, PHP and MySQL experience along with other specialty skills you will rarely find a great natural designer or a designer that decided to head down the web programmer career path. These are two separate skill sets that are rarely found in the same person. If you do have someone who says they can meet these two highly specialized skill sets, I would look closely look over their portfolio and evaluate the design and the coding on their own merits.

You will find that if you bring a designer and coder together for your project the end results will more then if you have a single person deliver both.