High profile site redesign- WorldVillage.com

[mayor]

(Admin code added by Palmer - 202149818)

Hey Gang,

I have had three templates done by you remarkable folks and I am now ready to throw my main site into the ring. Note: This design will take a great deal of creativity and patience to bring together. I am not in a tremendous hurry and I want to do this right.

WorldVillage.com has been online since 1995, providing family-friendly alternatives to much of the "unfriendly" content found online. We started by doing software reviews and downloads, and have expanded over the years to include online games, clean chat rooms, web site reviews, parental control software, a kid's site and a handful of offspring sites, such as:

http://www.familyfirst.com
http://www.freebitz.com
http://www.dealofday.com
http://www.prizepot.com

among others...

Here is the current design of the site.

http://www.worldvillage.com

While the site receives about 9000 or so visits/day, I find it to be lacking identity of its own. It is cluttered with too many links and offers few compelling reasons to bookmark and visit again.

The site has undergone many design changes as you can view here.

http://www.worldvillage.com/office/history.html

We initially started as a virtual community, highlighting the image map as the interface to access the different areas. As the content grew, I changed the format to a more "portal"-like look. I'm not sure it was a good idea, but I did it none-the-less.

Part of our problem is that while our site has a "front door" as the main page, we are embedded in search engines with hundreds of different pages as links. For example, people may enter our site at any of these pages:

http://www.worldvillage.com/kidz/
http://www.worldvillage.com/wvgames/index.html
http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/ht...iews/bounty.htm (http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/gamezone/html/reviews/bounty.htm)
http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/school/html...ml/downloa1.htm (http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/school/html/downloa1.htm)

As we changed the site, we frequently left old pages in place along with their old design. There is very little cohesiveness to the site. What's more, people will enter through a window and leave the site after they found what they want, never knowing the depth of content that WorldVillage.com has to offer.

So here is what I would like to do.

With the exception of the WorldVillage logo, I would like a new design from scratch. Here are additional parameters:

- I want to bring in dynamic content to appear on main page. Content will come from dealofday.com, familyfirst.com, Download of the Day, joelcomm.com, freebitz.com, prizepot.com, family news (from the newswire) and maybe others. I don't want you to create content, but as we work through this we can discuss how fresh content would appear on the page. It needs to be compelling and give people a reason to visit again. Obviously, we can't post complete articles from all these sites on the main page, so the design should lead people to click to the site of origin in order to read more.

- I want cascading style sheets set up that we can place on EVERY page on the site, brining them into a uniform look and feel (though we may have a few style sheets with variations, such as the game area or kid's portion of the site). As it stands, I have old banner code, old backgrounds, and old html v3.0 code on some of the pages. No reason to delete the old pages. I just want to make them uniform.

- I want to eliminate a good many links from the main page, keeping only what is necessary. Apart from the content we will be importing into the dynamic front page (which will automatically have links), these are the other items I want to link to:

Live Chat
DealofDay.com
SafetySurf.com

Apart from administrative links (contact us, affiliate program, etc), just about everything else is going to go away. Many of the links will appear on sub-pages, but the main page will be far less cluttered.

Part of your job is to help me give WorldVillage.com a fresh identity as a leader in family-friendly internet. I am open to your ideas and look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Rather than go all out on any one design, I think we should take this one slowly. Let's see some basic concepts of how you see this in your mind. I don't want anyone to put in a lot of time until we get a general feel for where this is going. I wish I could be more specific about what I want, but I am overwhelmed with content and need you people, the visionaries, to help me bring the NEW WorldVillage to fruition.

$300 bounty for the winner. Deliverables include the templates, CSS style sheets and any additional graphics required for buttons/tabs/etc. Mind you, we are talking about ONE standard template that will have some basic modifications for a couple sub-areas of the site. I have attached a sample logo, but I do have one available in Vector format if needed.

I am certain there will be many questions, and I will answer as promptly as I can. I will also post additional thoughts as they come to me. So, with that said, let the fun begin!

Joel

[JeremeDavid]

Can you outline everything that you want on the main page? This is a big task, but it will give a much clearer picture of what has to be worked around.

You mentioned several sites that you want to pull content from. I had a look at them. It looks like some may offer RSS feeds. How are you planning to pull the content in? Will you have control over the space it occupies and it's appearance? Is the "Today's Deals" section representative of the amount of content that will come from each site?

I assume that space still needs to be maintained for two banner ads?

That's it for now. I may think of some more as I'm working on an idea.

[mayor]

Thanks for your reply. I will try to get my act together and post more specific details about the front page. Part of the problem is I am not certain on exactly what I want. But a good design will be able to accomodate minor changes in content as we go.

I have complete control over the space the content will occupy. You are correct that much of the content we'll be pulling in is RSS. Today's deals is much too big. We'll probably only use headers for the deals instead of all the details. For example "Buy.com - $20 off purchase of $100 or more". Maybe the other areas will just pull a paragraph teaser in order to incorporate them into a small space.

We definitely want a 468 x 60 banner space at the top and a skyscraper place in the margin.

More questions? Fire away!

Joel

[JeremeDavid]

These ideas refer to the design on the left.

Your current site design is not bad. From a design point of view, it's my favorite kind of design to work on because it's full of information. The main problem I think is that everything is too spread out. Aside from the main section where you have you subsections currently, the design is not very cohesive. Simply sectioning things off and working with some different color combinations would make a huge difference.

A: You current logo in a box with rounded corners.
B: A graphical header depicting a family activity or a collage, perhaps.
C: A simple navigation bar. Tabs might look good here.
D: These would be your current sub sections like Family, Games, Downloads, etc... Instead of having a series of links, I would like to see a picture that represents each section and a short description to lead into it.
E: Your search box is there at the top. The other space would be reserved for content that you're pulling in from other sites. I'm not sure how much you want to have. That will have to be worked out.
F: This is your family friendly directory. I like the idea.
G: A footer area also possibly containing a banner.

These ideas refer to the design on the right.

A: Your logo here. Possibly integrated into the header depending on what kind of imagery ends up there.
B: A graphical header with either a family picture or something abstract and bright.
C: Part of the round-cornered header sectioned off to become a menu bar.
D: These spaces would be reserved for information that you're pulling in from other sites. This would be a good layout if you have nice even blocks of info. Each one would be topped by a relevant image.
E: As in the other design, these blocks would be for your subsections. No links - Just short descriptions.
F: A footer. Again possibly containing a banner.

What do you think about these layouts and my ideas?

[mayor]

<!--QuoteBegin-JeremeDavid+Dec 15 2003, 06:02 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (JeremeDavid @ Dec 15 2003, 06:02 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin-->
What do you think about these layouts and my ideas? [/b][/quote]
I think these are possibilities.. but I may go for an even more minimalist approach.. I See that no one else has chimed in, so perhaps I need to go back to the drawing board and get an even clearer idea of what I want to do before I try to get this done. I am going to have Palmer pull this contest for now.

I'll be back soon though!

Joel

[hheine]

Hi Joel. When is the deadline ?

Thanks,

[Palmer]

Contest closed at the request of the contest holder. It will reopen after the first of the year so hold on to any entries you've been working on.