Looking for website redesign advice

Hi Everyone, I need some advice. My website has gone thru several "redesigns". The latest was around 2003. I did everything myself and coded it using dreamweaver in html. I'm looking for a complete re-work of the informational front-end in Drupal just for content management purposes and hearing it was better suited for my purpose from a few different individuals with experience. I would liked to have tried to do this myself, but I no longer have the free personal time. Plus I'm somewhat of a perfectionist..I get bogged down with small things so that means projects which should take a few weeks for me take a few months.

I have a budget of around $2,000 and do not want to go beyond that. I'm looking to have a wiki-style user information contribution type setup. People can register, post an image, others can comment on it, vote it "liked" or "disliked", etc. Generally speaking I want to encourage more informative and higher quality contributions from my members and I think having the members be able to moderate the content themselves could really create some very rich content.

My concern is the selection process for the individual/company to do the work. How would you interview candidates for work on your site?

Also, regarding payment..I'm uneasy about giving any money up front. If I'm not happy with the way it looks/works I will be very annoyed if I have to pay for it. Would some provide a mock-up with no money down or do most require some money? how much?

Thanks for any help..

For design, there's no question that finding one is an impossible task without paying out a ton of money.

Luckily, you can make them fight for work!

I'd suggest running a contest at 99designs.com, and award the winner with the job of doing the whole thing or something like that. You can easily get 50+ submissions to look at and tweak to your liking.

Interesting idea Brian, Thanks!

I can advice you the best design is basic design without too much extra elements. For example google is a very good design. Because it's easy. For this reason i, use my custom design very close to vbs default design. Also the heavies designs will make you extra bant width and more reosurces to be consumed on the server level. Ther eare many vbulletin designers. I recommend you vBulletin 4.0 Themes and Custom 4.0 vBulletin Skins to checkout.