Yes I did outsource. It was a huge website with a lot of bells and whistles (this was my first mistake)... At the time, I was a C++ guy trying to get into the web, so I hired an outsourced designer and then hired a php guy in India to implement it.

What ended up happening by the end is that I fired the php guy for trying to sell my code to another company and then I rewrote most of the site myself since by then I was proficient in php/mysql and the code that was written was so inefficient that google crawling the site was crushing it. Lots of lessons learned in there.