[throwaway0x999]

Do you have friends who work in Technology? If so, I would start there and inquire. If not, before you go spend money on consultants who will drive your cost up, try building a network of technologists, programmers, and computer scientists. If you can, try to learn about the technology involved in building the product from them. Of course, this could be topical, but ultimately should help you in understanding the effort and consequently the cost to build what you want. Ideally this spike should reveal the tools we use, and hopefully, any intermediate applications of them (squarespace, wix, etc) to full fledged web frameworks (django, rails, etc).