When designing or updating your website color is a very important consideration. Many colors simply should never be placed anywhere near each other in any situation, much less if you want people to actually look at your site. Choosing colors is difficult. You want them to inspire feelings in people, make them comfortable and trusting of your site. You want people to feel the sites interesting without being overly flashy and distracting. Ultimately if your goal is to sell things you will have competitors and you'll want to not only think about what colors you use, but figure out exactly what colors they're using and if it's working for them.
These are all daunting tasks and yet they're not as difficult as you might think. When I'm designing out a website I find keeping a chart of color codes nearby is helpful. It helps me see colors near each other and reminds me what the color codes for each color are in case I forget (which i often do). You can purchase several really useful charts from a company called VisiBone(specifically) these are useful for color codes but they also have a free online color chart which I find useful to use sometimes. You can access it here The VisiBone Color Lab and also at this Mirror.
These color charts are also often helpful to me:
Another useful tool in my bag of tricks is a program called KaleidoSite Pro that allows me to do real time changes to a website design and see how the new color changes look. It's very powerful and helps me a lot with my productivity. It's not always perfect but combined with my color charts it's a good addition to my tool set. You can purchase it here The Webmasters Color Toolkit as well
For doing research on other peoples websites I often need to figure out what color codes they're using on a particular page. To do this I need some kind of tool to pick individual color codes out of a page. Recenty I found Color Clickz which is currently available individually or as part of the Webmasters Color toolkit here at Millionaire Geeks. I make almost daily use of these tools since I found them for web work, and even other graphic design work on my computer.
If you want to hire someone else to do the work for you though I understand. There are some good web designers at Spyder Tech LLC and their prices are fair. Whatever you decide, good luck!