Outsource or build it yourself
byoung2: I own an outsourcing company with a staff of 20 in Cebu, Philippines.  They handle web design, programming, data entry, etc., for small businesses, including my own projects.I would say that depending on what your project is, you'll find that there are some things that work well with outsourcing/offshoring, and others that don't.  I doubt you could suddenly learn how to program well in a short time, but you would probably have as difficult a time instructing a team of programmers if you don't know it yourself.You can learn enough to build a rough prototype, and hire programmers to fill in the gaps, because you'll have the most success the simpler the outsourced tasks are.  Here is how completely outsourcing a simple project might work (to keep costs low when hiring programmers, stick with LAMP):Let's say you have an idea for a cool web app that lets people looking to lose weight input foods that they usually eat, and the system will suggest lower-calorie alternatives.Since you know basic design you create a rough design and a list of specs for the different pages and post it on www.designbay.com to get a design. (~$200)You find a design that you like and you send it to www.psd2html.com for coding into html/css. (~$300)You know enough about PHP to start writing some code to make it interactive, so now people can fill in a form and submit it, but you need help with the back end.  This task is much easier if you take the time to learn object-oriented PHP, so that changes just have to be made to the classes. (~$0)Here's where you turn to www.elance.com to find a PHP/MySQL expert who can take the USDA calorie database (a list of every food and the nutritional content from the label) and put it in MySQL.  He also writes some code that takes the user's food list and finds lower calorie foods to swap (very easy to do with a few SQL statements). (~$450)Obviously this is a very simple example, and I left out much of the detail, but you get the point.  Of course, depending on how hands on you want to be, you can get this done much cheaper.  Just don't expect to be able to describe the project and have someone build it from scratch for anything less than a small fortune.