We're looking for the best approach to develop a website that will
deliver educational video content with e-commerce (monthly paid
subscription). We can do some development ourselves, but we feel the
best way is to outsource the website development. Questions:

1) What's the best way to outsource the website development? We know
about elance.com, is it the best? Any other alternatives? What kind of
money may the website with video content, database, templates,
e-commerce cost?

2) What are the proper tools? Linux + MySQL + PHP combination seems to
be a natural choice.  We don't really have time to compare different
tools that exist today on the market, so we just need to go with some
of the best tools. Once the website is developed, and is up and
running, we want to continue its further maintenance in house. Looks
like we need to use templates. Is it Smarty, PHP-Nuke, Mambo, etc?