Niche News Site Design (guaranteed + blind)

PokerNewsDaily.com

IMPORTANT: This is another posting of this project (http://99designs.com/web-design/con…ages-39246) so I could make it guaranteed and make it blind. I also increased the size of the contest. Don't post in the other one because I am not going to accept anything over there -- post here.

We are a web marketing company and PokerNewsDaily.com (also referred to as PND) is our primary news site. The site publishes anywhere from 1 to 15 articles per day and has been online in its current form for almost two years. It is one of the most trust online poker news sources and that professionalism is very important to the site.

Mainly males ages 18-40. Also mainly based in north America, Australia and Europe. But we do have audiences checking in from a huge array of countries and demographics so it isn't exclusively male.

We have been working on a design for this site and we have a few proposed pages which are attached. They are named accordingly. We're looking to redesign the site that you see online right now.

Things we like:
1. The location of elements. We generally like where things are on the page and how it's structured re: navigation, lists and menus. The original inspiration was WSJ.com
2. The sans serif look

Don't like:
1. Colors and logo. Teal is not good and the logo isn't authoritative.
2. Left column is too wide and right column is too narrow (homepage)
3. All of the background and "curled up paper" effects
4. Too colorful on the article page. We need to draw people more to the ad on the page and away from other elements. See WSJ.

The top of the left two columns on the homepage should have an optional design for a high priority story. WSJ does this sometimes. We'll add and remove the element as needed.

In addition to the article page, category page and homepage, we'd like the following pages to be made: poker room review page (/betfair-poker-review/), contact us page (/contact/) and a "simple" category page (m/articles/poker-tv/) - Put current URL in front to view page. Keep in mind that we aren't totally happy with the current site, particularly the poker room review page. It needs to be a lot more "conversion friendly" with good buttons and such.