Academic Research Group Site Design

My research group's website needs to be redesigned. Existing site was designed in 2008 using Ruby on Rails. Have wanted to revamp for some time. Recently, service provider (Joyent -> Textdrive) has become unreliable, prompting me to action. Prior designer/builder no longer doing such work. Site is anbarlab.org. It is probably down. An archived version can be found here: [login to view URL]://[login to view URL] New site should be more graphically appealing, streamlined, less text-intensive, more thematic. Would like to be built in Wordpress for easy updating (I have experience with simple Wordpress sites). Size of site TBD, but not likely to be very large. Should include basic features of typical academic faculty websites, but should have a more modern look-and-feel than most. We will need to spend time iterating on site design and features. I would like to get this job done as soon as practical - ideally by end of January. Budget is negotiable. Budget listed is an estimate.