Quote - G oldie hit it right on the nose and this was the subject of a letter I wrote to Admin. This web site is apparently being developed by people with just very basic web page design skills. They are clearly in over their heads and this is shocking from a company that serves the digital graphics arts community. You would expect them to hire the best and not thier half wit brother in law who has a first year course in web design.

What appals me is that this was unleashed on us as such. It clearly was at no more than a beta level test phase... at least by the standards of the people who employ me

There is a difference in design and development.  I don't know if the same people are doing both.  

Simply from what I have observed of how the site works, at least someone would need to be fimilar at least in the following from a development standpoint (this is what I do for a living for a much larger company).

Front End

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• Cross Browser Differences
• Reponsive Design

Back End

• PHP
• Apache
• Linux / UNIX
• MySQL
• Database Design
• Server configuration.
• Sessions and / or cookies

If they really wanted to make the site work well, they'd also have to be at least slightly fimilar with:

• Server Level Caching
• Content Delivery Systems
• Client Side Caching
• Software Design
• How Clients work (in relation to how the client downloads content and what blocks what)
• Page Rendering in General
• Site Analysis

From a front end viewpoint, a designer should at least be knowledgable about:

• Color Theory
• Desktop Design
• Mobile Design
• Responsive Layouts
• HTML
• CSS
• Usability
• User Experience

It's a pretty large range of skills required to really make a site like this work.  Not everyone can do it, and I didn't even touch on coding and QA practices such as automated testing, unit testing, regression testing, beta testing, and so on.