First of all if your looking at this being a serious investment, business or how ever you word it, then you need to treat it like one. 50% of my clients are those that came to me after they spent months trying to build something themselves.
Pay someone to develop this for you, its not that expensive and your ROI will be much much better. You will have a decent product that your business can use.
Learning a whole new skill set is desirable and fun, but hard work and distracting. The actual website is often one small part of the business plan, focus your efforts on your strengths, be it marketing, technical
If I was to be brutal, and I will be, if you cant grasp the concepts behind Wordpress then developing this is going to beyond your capacity in the short-medium term.
Wordpress is a a content management system, have a google of CMS and read up what they are
I dont mean to be a downer but if you are serious then you need a solid foundation, trust me, I have so many clients tell me that they wish they got a developer straight away rather than try to do it themselves.
Jgriggs, thanks for the honest input. That’s what I need. I just need to find someone to develop this for me. The problem isn’t finding someone the problem is finding someone I can trust to do it right with me not knowing much about the background. Any input on that would be much appreciated. Thanks
For best results I would recommend hiring locally. Ask around through friends and what not. Chances are you will find someone. Those freelance sites are a wasteland of criminals and hacks residing in other countries who can rarely be held accountable under law so be warned. Cheap yes but you get what you pay for. With a lower budget you would be better of lowering your expectations and hiring locally than going the cheap route. Any useful website is in continuous development anyway. Once launched you can than add features as your budget/profit allows.
I haven’t personally reviewed these plugins so I dont know how good of a fit they are with your project but there seem to be no shortage of document management plugins for wordpress.
A ready made solution may be more appropriate if you’re on a tight budget. Bespoke development will almost always be more expensive. However you will probably need to at least learn how to install wordpress. The learning curve for this can be significantly lowered by investing in a good shared hosting provider who provide easy-to-use web menus for installing and managing wordpress installations and then you can experiment with document management plugins to see which are a good fit for your project. This may give you around 95% of what you want if you’re lucky. Shared hosting can be acquired for around $5/month which should be good enough for evaluation purposes. Maybe something like hostgator.com but I am sure there are others as well.
