Since being away from the technology, what are some of the best practices of today? Backend, front end. php, asp, off the shelf dev tools?

https://www.filepicker.io/ is the best thing that you can integrate with this app which suits your requirement. If you are the owner of the app, you can integrate it very quickly. If not, you can suggest the app owner to do it Feel free to call me if you need more clarification. I am consulting architect for few companies in US and India on mobile, web and windows/linux/mac apps.

I hope this answer will help you in two ways: It should help avoid unnecessary expense being incurred and it should also help you recruit software engineers to build your project. Before you spend a single dime on building, I'd encourage you to validate the idea itself with potential customers. Identify the kind of person you are thinking of solving a problem for, and just explain the high-level concept. Make sure that a sufficient percentage of them are saying "yes, I need this." Then, really distill the idea further into a single piece of functionality that this customer base says they want. There are tools that allow for "drag & drop prototyping" like fluid.io that you can use to create a clickable walkthrough of the user flow you're looking to create. The more that you can do to validate the idea and focus it, the more you can define your "Minimum Viable Product." If you can't find enough of your potential customers to get excited about the idea, I would advise against hiring anyone to implement anything. That said, it's also a lot easier to recruit talent when you can say "I spoke to 100 potential customers and 40 of them said they would use this" or better yet, pay for it. Convincing anyone to work on your idea will be considerably easier if you can show some existing proof or interest around the idea. From there, your best source (assuming you don't have a network of people to draw from) might be local colleges & universities. I would advise against hiring online or working virtually with someone when you are new to building product. I'd be happy to talk to you about your project, how to validate the concept and how - if you decide to pursue it - to hire good talent. Best of luck!

Create an ideal customer profile. Create some questions that will allow to you survey a potential tester to determine if they fit your profile. Design simple landing page with very clear value proposition that speaks to your ideal customer. Ask for a minimum of information up-front (email), but ask for more info after they commit by submitting the first piece of info. (KISSmetrics does a good job of this on their current website trial signup). Use the their answers to these profiling questions to put the applicants into buckets. Let in the most ideal bucket first, or split them into groups if they're big enough. Try and measure engagement the best you can. Measure qualitative and quantitative data. Schedule calls with your beta testers to find out more, especially with the ones who's user behavior seemed to indicate that they didn't get value from your product. Find out why. Make sure they are indeed your ideal customer. Pick up the phone and get to know your customers inside and out. Meet them in person if possible. Incorporate their feedback quickly and get more feedback. Rinse repeat.

Usually Programmers are only slow when they don't know how to solve a particular problem. So they will spend a lot of time researching and a lot of trial & errors to solve a problem. It is important that before you engage a programmer on a project, you break down the entire project into simple, easy to understand modules. Let him give you an estimate of how many hours he will require to complete each of the modules. Example: a typical site will have a login module, registration, My account, profile etc. So let him estimate how much he will require to do the login. You can go even detail here. (e.g. how much extra time if you were to implement Facebook/Twitter Login?). Once he start developing, track his progress closely and make sure he is following his given timeline. If he goes over his budgeted time on a module, talk with him and see what went wrong. It is often seen that they may be wasting their time on something very insignificant that you may have asked him to implement, but you can totally go by without it too. So by understanding what is taking longer time, you will be able to prioritise things better. You definitely need some tools to get this done. Google Spreadsheet or Excel works just fine. But if you don't mind spending a few bucks there are many agile project management tools that you might look into. Here is a list, google them all and sign up for trials: * AgileZen * Agile Bench * Assembla * AssiTrack * Blossom * Basecamp * Breeze * DoneDone * Eidos * Fogbugz * GreenHopper * Jugggla * Kanbanpad * Pivotal Tracker Or the reason why he is slow can be purely non-technical. Sometime your developer may don't share the same level of enthusiasm as you about the idea that you are working on. They often don't often see the "bigger picture" (since you don't share everything with them explicitly). If you can somehow get them excited about what he is a part of, it will work like a drug :) He will work day and night without questioning you. But you need to work equally as hard as him. The moment he sees that you are the boss and he is just the guy doing work for you -- his mentality will shift from being part of something to being the low paid developer. Ultimately its all about motivation and making him a part of your venture. After all he deserves it, if he is really playing a crucial role in the entire development.

If I was just starting out, I'd consider learning Meteor (https://www.meteor.com/). It's just entered version 1.0 and after working with it for a little less than a year I do have some issues with it but it still makes for a very solid framework that gets you up and running very fast. You would only need to learn Javascript, and you can slowly work your way towards nodejs from there (which Meteor is based on) if you want to, or you could get the basics down and focus on learning design if you prefer.