Thanks everyone, plenty of food for thought there.
I think the point about being clear of what exactly you want is very important. Expressing that can be a bit more difficult, so I think next time I will draw up some page layouts with an old school pen and paper.
With our previous site a some years back, we wanted a feminine look to compliment the product. The brief was for an elegant style that would appeal to female visitors but ended up with something more suited to a grunge garage band.
It had lots of fancy flash and other cool looking features that popped up and down, in and out but it loaded like a dripping tap and was nothing like we had originally imagined, in fact it looked like they had done completely the opposite of what was asked.
That's where the point above became so important and I feel we failed to be specific enough in our brief and didn't keep a close eye on the progress during development. We were making progress payments but not offered (didn't think to ask) for a look to see how it was progressing. It was all done in-house and not available for viewing on the net. When I write it down now, in hindsight it sounds so foolish, I wouldn't commission a builder and not visit the site until completion
but the net was fairly new and web designers seemed to paint an aura of wizardry about them: Don't ask - you wouldn't understand, mortal.
We finally published after about 5 months of waiting for what was promised to take 2 weeks. I could never seem to get the incredibly clumsy editor software, which was apparently developed in house, to work properly so I quickly took to learning some basic cut and paste HTML to allow me to update it. Picking at the code in Notepad and FTP seemed the easiest way to update, but now HTML seems redundant. In the end we weren't even covering the hosting fees, we were made an offer for the business
(basically just for the domain name value) and offloaded the lot. We made more from the domain then I ever did from the actual site
Given that experience, I am sure I could learn Wordpress myself. I have been looking at the available themes and it looks like all the work is already done I just need to fill in the blanks. Although setting it up looks a bit daunting at first I'm sure it is doable for a basically I.T. literate person, it's just justifying the time to study it, then the time to build it. Our idea is still at the concept stage so there is no rush.
Devank it looks great, I'd be more than happy with that site.
Cheers,
Beef.