Trying to figure out more about these sites

[brandonna]

I'm planning the redesign/upgrade of my site which is currently in wordpress to something that looks like the following. Can you experts out there in .php tell me if these are:

1) just custom wordpress templates or designed from the ground up
2) how much it would cost to do something like one of these projects; just ballpark estimates so I can budget out for it
3) is there a way that I can keep "control" on my site like I do currently with my wordpress template?

http://seosumo.com
http://forums.seo.com
http://www.walletpop.com

Thanks in advance.

[chrishea]

The first and the third aren't identified as to what system was used to build them. They may be custom designs. The second one is built using VBulletin. That's a system that you can download and use, in conjunction with Wordpress if you wish. In every case, the experience and skill of the person doing the implementation will affect the time required. For someone who has implemented VBulletin before, a basic shell could probably be implemented in a day or less (assuming that the server is already available and so forth). There is then some setup required for the forums that you need and maybe some other customization. There would be some time required to connect VBulletin to WordPress if you wanted to do that.

It isn't clear what you mean by control. If you use VBulletin you can probably use different colors / themes but it will still look very much like every other VBulletin system.

You can create a WordPress template to provide almost any look. If there isn't an existing WordPress template like the ones shown, one could be created (again by someone who knows what they are doing). It would probably be simpler to work in the other direction first and go through the existing WordPress templates and see if there is one that appeals to you (which might look like one of the examples you have shown).