Despite Brad and I continuing to put in some long hours, we're still tweaking and fine-tuning the spec.

We've added in an Admin interface so that we can effectively maintain the site and deal with user and customer enquiries effectively. This has almost doubled the scale of the development effort required but without it, we'd risk providing a poor service as it would be extremely difficult to monitor what was going on in the site.

We've also now got a much better idea about best-practice architecture for this type of site. We've read a lot about 3-tier architecture which essentially seeks to separate the code into 3 separate layers - presentation (for the look and design of the site), business logic (where all the business rules are incorporated into functions) and the data layer (where the data is actually stored). There's a lot of discussion about the theory of all of this, but very little describing how this actually translates in practice.

We've also been looking at whether we should use a templating engine which would simplify and speed up the development. However, the cost of this is a slower website - depending on who we listen to, this could be slight or significant - so we've decided against this option.

Hopefully, we'll have the spec completed soon and we can post it on Rentacoder.com and start getting bids in from developers.