Have you asked cleothemuse yet? I can do very basic, but all I know I learned from her, and she knows a 'whole' lot more.

$150 an hour? Holy shit. Try $25-$50 an hour. Hell, I'll do it if he needs someone and doesn't need fancy flash stuff ;)

I've usually heard something like $50/page initial setup (usually a limited number of pages), then they tack on the $25-$50 / hr for adjustments and fine-tuning.

Also, if you're thinking mostly text-only, the best idea would be to find a free (or very cheap) WYSIWYG program, i.e. drag-and-drop. They're easy to manage and do the basics very well.

He needs to define "designing". A really good web designer does creative things with Photoshop I'd never imagine, slices, dices, html standard, pure CSS layouts, cross-browser, etc. That isn't cheap.

He can get someone to hack up a design using tables for layout and throw text and graphic in for $10-20 an hour, but sometimes you get what you pay for. If he wants go do that, he should pick a nice design from an open source site and just have someone fit his content to it.

He can download all the free templates he'd like from oswd.org =)
Not fancy, but easy to work with and they're usually well-designed. Ant student with an editor can fit content to them.