If you dont' want complicated code for a mortgage calculator, I have a widget you can easily add at http://www.mortgagesum.com.

My recommendation is to start at the end and work backwards. What do you envision a site will provide for you/your prospects. Once you've determined that, you can search for the processes/tools that will perform those functions. Once those decisions are made, you can see if a templated site fulfills the need, or you need a custom site. It's way easier to get comparative quotes when you know what you want.

Hello RealtorForte and All

As a Real Estate Marketing Consultant, I would highly recommend you hiring someone to develop your site. Having allot of computer knowledge does not make you a website development expert. Sure you can get something up and going, but does it reflect you as a person/organization which is where your need professional advice. You don't want to be selling million dollar homes and the website looking like it was developed for free.

Developing a website is not all that difficult to do as you can see how many so called web designers are out there doing it, but it is the planning process to get there that is challenging and putting reasoning behind everything that is posted up to the site. There is also skill behind what the web developers do, but it is the plans and the content of the site that drives the deliverables of the web developers in the end. No matter what route you decide to take, get some professional advice in the process of doing it.

Feel free to contact me if you would like some free website development tips and tricks.

I do agree with the need to get someone who knows what he is doing. You need to put your best foot forward at all times. If you have a bad looking site and pass the url on to people, many will assume you're not doing that well and the level of trust towards you is going to decrease.

Unfortunately, the statement "If you build it, they will come" never was meant to be used by internet marketerers... it's a lot of work to generate traffic-- and you need to be able to change your site and get it to function the way you want.

I'd say it's better to have an ugly-but-updatable template site than a site that you can't easily make changes to (due to a hard-to-reach consultant)