If you and your clients might like those sites, you probably have to hire that designer. Your designer will know the technology and not waste your money learning a new platform. Designers who host are likely to be more invested in the industry and around longer. Prepare well, be clear about what you want but do not over direct, let the site evolve over time, and don't go for the cheap fix. Clients who are cost conscious will bring the designer web-ready text and graphics and they will deliver it all up front.
Clients deliver content in all kinds of states, from paper to video to disk to a messy combo.
Images then need to be optimized for the web, which you can do, but that's one of the key skills your paying for from a designer. To build pages, the designer will need the headlines, captions, main text, any sidebar, quotes, headers, footers, etc., as well as the all-important title, keywords, and descriptions. While you can save money by giving all these pieces to the designer, a good full service designer is also a good writer, and knows how to pull from the text you provide to make all those additional pieces. Suppose you hire someone to make letterhead. Then you hire someone else to make business cards.