I am a newbie thinking about using Moodle for a series of online courses our small company is planning to develop. Having reviewed some Moodle sample sites, we think that we want to use the courses, lessons, resources, quizzes, glossary and maybe the news features. Initially, we wouldn't want to use (or show) the chats, forums, surveys, wikis or workshops. Also, we want a reasonably customized look-and-feel with our own colours and logos as well as a layout that reasonably unique from the out-of-the-box Moodle look. Importantly, all the courses must display material in English and French (same content but both languages for all student accessible information).
So I have two questions:
1. I'm not very good at software installation and configuration. If it's anything more complicated then clicking on an EXE and possibly modifying a few visually driven prompts, I tend to get stuck and burn a lot of time getting nowhere. I know people who are good at taking packages and following involved installation and customization instructions but I'm not one of those people. Am I realistically going to need to hire a Moodle expert to get the software up-and-working with the look-and-feel that I want?
2. What sort of effort/timeframe should I be expecting to do the sort of customization that I described above? Not having worked with the product, I don't know if I should expect it to take a week or a few months.
We're at the Custom Build vs. Use Moodle decision point in the project but Moodle is such a black box to me right now that I find it extremely difficult to guesstimate what costs or effort would be involved with adopting Moodle.