Content has been received from the winners, and payments made.

Thanks again to everyone. I'm sure I'll be back for another one sometime down the road.

j

Thanks again to everyone for their entries. It was a difficult choice.

We began by asking if either of us had selected a combined logo/template entry as clearly better. Neither of us had.
We then considered the same for any individual logo or template separately. Neither of us had.
We then started listing out which logos and templates were our favorites, and identified about 4 of each.
Then we started considering the various combinations we might go with (since it seemed clear we\'d probably split the awards).

Finally, we selected the following:

Logo: voreldesigns #2
Template: unique-i #2

Winners, please contact us so that we can work out contract and payment info.

Thanks again to everyone, it was a tough decision.

j

Just as an FYI to everyone, still working on deliberations, may take a little longer than expected, hope no latter than Saturday PM to have initial awards.

j

We're roughly 24 hours away from the end of the contest. We are very pleased with a number of the entries and will need to make some tough decisions.

Some administrative stuff:

We will award for best logo and best template (coded gets the extra money if the one we choose is that, but we will choose what we like best). So, we might choose two winners or we might choose one.

Once winners are announced, per contest holder guidelines as listed by SitePoint, we will need to have signed complete transfer of copyright (excepting winners will retain the right to display their content as part of their portfolio and any other rights that are non transferable as creators of the content) and the originality of their work warranted, etc.

We have a prepared document for this or winner may have their own (I've handled it both ways previously). As long as everything that is important is covered, we are fine with either.

We do prefer to have signed by both parties and exchanged via scanned into email or other arrangement.

As a scheduling note, though the contest ends Thursday 7-ish CST in the US, we will probably not award till Friday PM (scheduling conflict). Just don't want anyone to panic if it doesn't happen immediately.

Thanks to everyone for their participation. It will be a close decision.

j

Site designers:

A little more clarification from me on some things.

I definitely don't want stock images where there is any question as to ownership/rights, etc. It has to be free and clear of those concerns.

One possible thing people might consider (this isn't an absolute must, but something that might spur some ideas):

Something that looks sort of portal-like, where you have a center/main content that has whatever we are going to put there, but then instead of just repeating the nav as another list, have smaller boxes that might have little blurbs of content that when clicked on goes to those specific pages.

For instance, we will probably want to have a page that contains industry-specific news, links to content on other sites that we think is important to the industry, in addition to whatever corporate news we put up. So, perhaps a box on the home page that has the most recent industry news which would then go to a fuller list of items. And similar for the other nav items.

They don't literally have to be boxes, but here is where smaller stock images, special icons, etc. could provide some value, as small supporting elements to the main content.

j

One note of clarification. We want the logos to read the name as "Crescendo" not "e-Crescendo."

Apologies for any confusion.

The short answer is 'I just don't like it' but that isn't very useful.

There's a company I do business with (that I like) and they did a web redesign about a year or so ago, and it was much better than what they had, and the first thing I thought when I saw it was "That picture of those smiling people? None of those people work there."

I suppose there are places for it when done well (though I don't know how to define 'well'), and I think designs should have graphics, but I think they should provide some value. And a lot of stock photography doesn't really add anything (look at our current site, we put in stock photos to fill space really, since we didn't intend to market it much at all at the time we built it).

j