Then you iterate two or three times. This could have been done in a month. It comes from politics, but I think you want to scale back a little bit. That would be my advice for the new site as well. The less blatantly you promote yourself, the more credibility you gain.
Credibility is a major issue on the Web.
The standard thing that comes to mind are sites like Amazon and Yahoo, which let you get through large amounts of information in a very efficient manner. Another point is that given their particular position, they need to have more of that official image to it as well. And that's a little bit odd when you look at the homepage right now. It doesn't look very official. It looks like someone put it up in two hours.