Do Good design and Great Programming Grow on Trees?

Contrary to the current concensus, it costs real money to get a designer and programmer to sync up your desires with what is possible for web layout, functionality, and proper development. Conceptualizing, planning, designing, creating, testing, debugging, and polishing are absolutely necessary and all account for real costs in the process. Some still maintain "surely, the internet is much cheaper than everything else in the real world, and we shouldn't have to actually invest in a business solution that could yield a much quicker return on our investment."

As is the case in most facets of life, you get precisely what you pay for (i.e.

The Internet Is Vastly Underutilized, and Bad Looking.

For all the good and amazing things the internet has done for society, it is still pretty primitive from an aesthetics standpoint. Whenever I look up a basic product search on Google, I get the top ten results back and all of the sites typically look like a first grader designed them in Microsoft Word circa 1997. Which is something I just plain can't wrap my brain around: they look bad and are riddled with mystery meat navigation. At least if you're going to make it look bad, make it easy to navigate. The average life cycle for a website design, especially one that's e-commerce driven is about 3 yrs or so. Gap.com redoes their site annually.