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You get what you pay for.
If dial-up is what you think most of your clients have, then it's smart to keep file size in mind when putting together graphics, to make sure they are optimized for download speed.
Having the site search engine optimized out of the the box is also a good thing, and something many web designers don't quite manage to do, though more are including that.
I think the ideal for your stage is to have someone code your site as a Wordpress theme, which would allow you to add and change pages very easily. That's what I do for almost all the new sites I build now.
But yeah, look over the portfolios of the people you got bids from and contact those sites - the problem I often have with web people is that creatively they are brilliant, but they couldn't live up to their commitments to save their lives. So I'd ask about whether they got projects done on time.
I would imagine you aren't really able to look at the code of the site to see how well it was coded and add that to your considerations of how valuable each of the different designers is, so you'll just have to wing in on that one.
Good luck!
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