You are right about the complicating factors, but in this instance, the pub team was willing to really work within the capabilities and limitation of the CMS which made the dev team’s job so much more straightforward. Because of that, they were able to get a very nice site to market quickly. Again, this does not include the costs of converting over content.

What were the soft costs involved in terms of internal time and planning?

For example, who did the graphical design, alpha testing, beta testing, Q/A, etc. and what were their roles within the business?

I’ve found that the time delay is usually internally caused in a project like this — because there are other priorities (creating content for existing products, making sales for existing products, corporate budgets and other items) that also have to be accomplished by the staff that actually know the business that the Web site is being designed for.

Note that I’m not challenging that what you did can be accomplished. Heck I can put up a forum in a few days using vBulletin with only minimal outside help (one day if I can use standard themes and graphics and already have the folder structure and some other background ahead of time) and have put up pretty decent event sites in a similar day or two frame, but instead am saying that the internal prioritization of the project *among the content and business experts* is the hard thing to get across and that it isn’t a “throw this to the Web guy/gal/team and we’ll get a site.”