James, I can't wait until you get freelanceful.com up and running! Looks great! In the meantime I will also check out Odesk.
Thanks! I think $10K may be on the high side; you can use a easy wireframing tool like balsamiq.com and build out exactly what you want like SEMSniper suggested and go through it and through it again and again like 30 times to make sure you didn't miss anything; then approach a coder and give him what you got. They should be able to give you a fairly accurate project price, but be sure to try to stay on the original plan as possible. Of course there will be pivots as some functionality won't be able to work as things are coded, but the problem comes in when people don't stick to the MVP (minimum viable product) and keep adding and adding.
Should be no more than 150 hours at the most for a project like yours if you wireframe it out really nicely. and thats $7500 tops.
Any good PHP freelancing coder will run about $50/hour locally. In the South anyways. Some may be upwards to $75/hour, and most firms will charge at least $100/hour. But if you can do your homework and find a person for $50/hour; they will usually be quality.
Another tip is FastNAwesome for the homepage frontend. Go to themeforest.com and buy a theme for wordpress and learn some basic html/css and go in there and try to tweak it. By the time, the coder is done; you'll have learned and have a homepage up already. The community is vibrant for wordpress.
Are these regular US rates? I thought it was more along the lines of $70-100.
Hey Fast, yeah I've been pretty successful finding good PHP guys for around $50/hour. I shy away from folks who charge less than that cause they don't have confidence in their skills or something.. but yeah, I've ran across a few with $70 rates, but not higher than that. Firms usually $100/hour+ and then the Ruby on Rails guys are more expensive. Usually starting $60 and up.. normally around $80-100 for RoR..