You'd be surprised what some mappers in here would do for publicity If you want someone to help you there's always our map request forum.

As for software...I am still a fan of CC3 only because I know it and its easy for me to produce maps in, but it has a steep learning curve. If you're already a capable image person with photoshop or Gimp however, there's some great tutorials here from our users on mapping with those as well as other tools Like Xara and whatnot.