If you are a Web designer with large budget to back your project, you can call up whatever resources you require to get the gig done.
Professional photographers and models to create great looking images? Book ’em.
HTML and CSS experts to creating great looking layouts. No Problems?
Professional copy writers to write the “Great Australian Content”. Order a dozen.
For the rest of us, we work on a shoe strings. We need all the help you can get. IBM (yep Big Blue themselves) has an article entitled Get free stuff for Web design. It covers all sorts of free Web resources, as well as warnings against some stuff that might seem free, but may not be.
Some of the great resources covered, Creative Commons (CC), as a source of licenses used by people who offer free stuff.
CSS instruction and examples, the most famous of which would have to be CSS Zen Garden.
Several sites are covered that offer royalty-free graphics. One project that you should pay attention to is the Open Clip Art Library, a collection of contributed, down-loadable clip art.
Design tools are covered such as Wellstyled.com’s Color Scheme Generator. It’s great for those of with challenged colour taste.
Have a look at the article. It might save you a lot of stress.