New Website Needed: Help!

Hello Doctors,
I've decided to perform a long overdue extraction and pull down my old and ugly and outdated website and replace it with something that doesn't appear as if it was created in prison. :o
I am clearly a dummy when it comes to this stuff and so I am going to have it built for me from scratch. At this point I feel like a woman walking into a mechanics shop for an oil change and coming out with a new engine and a $4,000 bill.
What am I looking for in a new site? I'm hearing about things like Wordpress, Joomla, etc.
What's the latest, greatest way to build a site that is fast loading, search engine optimized, and easy for me to manage behind the scenes? What else should I be concerned with?
Any input is appreciated. Thank you!

It might help if we had an idea of what you website needs to be designed to do. Is it something simple like displaying some text, images, photos, etc.? I assume you are not looking at an e-comerce site where you are selling items.

Actually, it does involve some e-commerce. I have been selling a manual for the past nine years online on my current site. I'll still be doing so, but switching from a hard copy that was ordered and shipped to a PDF and instant download.

Possibly useful links:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=...79&safe=active

There are some rules and norms before developing a website, which a developer must follow. At first it is to be decided what is the user requirement, then study of feasibility etc. More steps involve there. That is how you can build up a complete well developed site...

You will want to make sure that you have good administrator abilities with your site so that you can be dynamic when it comes to making changes and dealing with customer service. I would recommend doing something in Ruby on Rails because it is the cleanest and most popular right now. Although it may be a little more difficult to manage, they are the slickest sites in my opinion. Hope this helps!

Not sure if you finally got your website up and running again. I am a website design and will be happy to help you create or renovate your website. PM if interested.