Adventure Travel Website - Design & Build

My start-up company is launching a new e-business; a travel agency website offering luxury adventure holidays. We are looking for a skilled web-designer to take the page hierarchy structure, content files and design brief I have created; work up spec's for us to review & agree; and then build, test & launch the site on our registered domain. I am an ex-IT program manager, so should be pretty realistic and easy to work with, and I am keen to listen to your views on improvements to the structure, design and technology. I will need you to provide an indicative timeline for the work and guide me on how we keep the site as flexible as possible for future extensions and add-ins. I will also expect regular reports and a series of deliverable based billing milestones (or payment on completion). The initial content will include a landing page, customer data capture, authority / testimonials micro-site and full e-business website with holiday products pages (photo & video), map / filter / searching functionality, secure online purchasing, admin back-office area, user area, online community / blogging pages / soc-net feeds, contact information and live web chat functionality. We will also need to link in a series of feeder domains to get the right sort of traffic to our website and earn income from referral clicks. I have identified 3rd Party sites as a functionality guide for all key features (see [login to view URL] & [login to view URL] as a starter) - so the ability to reproduce these sorts of sites to the same standard is important. The intention is to launch with ~50 products but to develop the product catalogue (in size and complexity) over time. Our focus will be on building a prospect & customer database, a niche online community, an efficient sales engine and a network of adventure providers & hotels around the world, all via the site. Clearly as this site and business develops there will be further work to bid on and we could look into setting up a support contract with you at some point. I have worked remotely from my IT team for a number of years and know the value of full specification and agreement up front. I therefore request an initial 'base cost' bid on the project deliverables as outlined, but please do price further extensions you advise as extras, as these will evidence your experience. I will select the package that best fits the ongoing needs of the business at the right value - not just the cheapest. That said, we are a start-up! ;-) The right contract bidder will need to share proof of web-design, build, test experience, and have an online-community / network-building skill-set; plus, ideally, some testimonials from other satisfied clients. I am open to providing clarifications before you bid if you need more information! The work should be your top priority on acceptance of your bid and launch will need to be complete before 31 Mar 2011. I look forward to hearing from you and building an interesting and exciting site together! Regards, Rob PS. We will own all copyrights to all work upon payment. Any content, coding and feature shall be unique and it will not be permitted to reuse them without written permission and on a case by case basis. Non Disclosure Agreement will be required as part of contract.