As someone with little to no web development experience, it quickly became clear that I was going to need to hire someone to put the site together for me.
After asking around to see who knew good web developers, it seemed like everyone did, and collecting random tidbits from conversations was no way to go about selecting someone to whom I would be paying a fair amount of money. I had just read Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat and thought about a site I had seen awhile back, www.elance.com, which does the same thing for freelance consultants, web developers, designers, etc and prospective clients that Referral Union hopes to do for professionals.
With elance, you can can post a project and several (I had seven) providers can bid on it over a given amount of time (a week for me). Several of the bidders were based in India (hence the Friedman reference above, which talks a lot about outsourcing and off-shoring), and they seemed to offer the best value, in general. After they bid, I simply selected the one I thought would do the best job for the best price. A nifty feature offered by elance, which is common to other intermediaries such as ebay, is a provider feedback section, where each bidder is rated by previous clients. This really helped me make my decision and gave me confidence in the bidders' ability to handle the job.
Things are still in the development phase, obviously, but I have been very pleased with Manish at Web Integrated so far. The only road bump is the time difference, nine hours, which occasionally causes communication delays.
and thought about a site I had seen awhile back, 
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