Is it viable to...

> Well, like I said, it's not something a novice is going to be able to do easily..

I agree. It's not rocket science, but it does take a lot of time and effort if you don't know what you're doing. Harry, two years ago I was where you are now. In that time I've tried to build three sites:

· a large, complex school site
· a small business site
· a family website

The school website got 80% done before it ground to a halt because of the sheer difficulty of making all the different parts work properly and in an integrated manner. I spent 750 hours on it. About 70% of that was researching and testing dozens of different modules, and discovering their strengths and weaknesses. Drupal has many more weaknesses than strengths if you are not an expert in php/sql/css. I am now in the process of re-doing the school site from scratch as three separate, small sites instead of one large one. I anticipate only about 80 hours per site this time (250 hours total), because they are smaller, less complex, functionally limited, and I already know which modules to use for each.

The business website is up and running. It took 120 hours. However it is only a very basic site and needs another 80 hours before I could say that it has the main functionality needed for the business.

I spent about 30 hours on the family site, and it is not yet functional. It will have to wait until the other sites are finished, as it is not a priority. I anticipate about 200 hours total for this site because it has to include media handling. I've already spent 40 hours researching media modules, and got absolutely nowhere because none of them worked well enough. Media handling and wysiwyg editing in Drupal is appalling as far as I'm concerned.

I should mention that I demanded fairly high visual quality and excellent usability for these sites (although they still get blown away by professionally designed ones). You'll get some people on these forums saying that they managed to get their site up and running in a week of downloading drupal, but if you then go to these sites they are usually shockingly bad and don't actually do anything clever or interesting - just ugly, basic installs. However, using CSS to theme my sites up to a good level and making sure they work in the three main browsers, has been one of the most frustrating, aggravating experiences ever. I can, on occasion, spend five solid hours trying to solve ONE small themeing bug in IE.

My advice is, if you want to do it yourself but don't have 300-400 hours to spend learing Drupal and researching modules, try using wordpress instead. Your site will look stunning out of the box, and will only take a week to master the features of your entire site. However, you'll need to work around the fact that your reviews will be in a 'blog' format.

I think you could pay someone 50$ or 60$ to install and set-up drupal for you, with a downloaded theme and few crucial modules added. However that would only get you 20% finished. You'd still have to actually build your site after that, and still have to learn how to use drupal core and your chosen modules.

To do your entire site, I'd imagine you'd get offers anywhere from 300$ to 2000$, depending what functionality you actually want, whether you want to compete with the large, established game review sites, and how visually stunning you want it to look.