Modern, Forward-Thinking Design for Web Development Company

Orion Group

As of Wed. Oct 20th, we are no longer accepting entries from NEW designers. Only designs submitted by designers who have already submitted a design to this contest prior to 8pm will be considered for the prize.

Existing designers currently competing in this contest, please continue with your refinements, and we will give feedback every few hours until the end of the contest.

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We are a web design and development company in the Milwaukee, WI metro area. We have recently launched an Internet Marketing division which is growing extremely fast. As a company, we pride ourselves in best practices and staying at the cutting edge of application development. We want that to come through in our visual design as well.

Our existing client base is small to medium companies. We have focused heavily on the home building and remodeling niche, but we don't want to limit ourselves to that. We want clients who recognize the benefits of working with a forward-thinking company that takes pride in their work and doing things right. Since marketing is part of our business, we ourselves need to have a clear marketing message reinforced by our design.

In order of priority, we want:

1. A design that reflects modern trends and sensibilities
- It should be clean, uncluttered, bold and visually appealing.
- Liberal use of whitespace
- White or light-colored text background
- bold, interesting background (examples provided below)

2. Easy to navigate
- We will focus our three main services on the home page: web development, internet marketing and hosting.
- Each section should clearly communicate its message and draw the user to click deeper into the site for more information

3. Showcase our work and skills
- Since we are selling ourselves, we want people to see what we have done in the past and what we can do in the future

2

Home page and Interior page

Home Page: three main focus areas as described in requirements, other site navigation (contact us, search, etc) is accessible but not featured

Interior Page: internal navigation should also emphasize our 3 main divisions, but not as much as the home page. Sidebar needed for common elements such as news or promotions.

We'd also like a mockup of a simple contact form on the interior page so we can use this same style in all our content forms.

http://www.orionweb.net

Our current site has too much text and no clear direction. Visually, it looks dated and doesn't represent us well. The navigation doesn't properly highlight the things we care most about.

http://www.simplebits.com and http://www.ciplex.com are two examples of very different backgrounds, but we like both. I don't think we want a photo-realistic background, but something to add texture, interest, visual appeal

http://www.inowweb.com - i don't like the font or navigation, but it seems to have good "focus" - it's very easy for me to see what they're trying to say about themselves and how i would find more information

http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com - i love the typography and layout. while we wouldn't do a long one-page site like this, each section is very clean and easy to absorb

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Note:

As of Wed. Oct 20th, we are no longer accepting entries from NEW designers. Only designs submitted by designers who have already submitted a design to this contest prior to 8pm will be considered for the prize.

Existing designers currently competing in this contest, please continue with your refinements, and we will give feedback every few hours until the end of the contest.