totally agreed abbasmehdi "find people who are..." and thanks for the comment.

regarding basic web development: we've built several sites over the last 10 years, but have never learned to hack in a language (e.g. RoR); just bits of code as needed and lots of 'wysiwyg' manipulation.

we're basically trying to build a web application and think given our current jobs and lives it would take us a year or longer (much, much longer!) to acquire that sort of skill set, so we think best handled by experts (or experts in training).