Small Vitamin store wants to compete with the big boys!

The Vitamin Store

I am looking for a modern and pleasing new website layout for my client who operates a vitamin store in Wisconsin who generates half of their current sales from their current website www.shopthevitaminstore.com  As you will see when you visit it the site is not much to look at at all. None the less he is doing quite well on it getting about 5 orders per day. What is most challeging is that currently he gets a lot of traffic but not as many sales as he'd like. Thus the new look. I have told him if his site looked more professional that he might have a higher turn over rate. He agrees. I developed the site for him about 3 years ago and not a great deal of emphasis was placed on graphics. I used an open source shopping cart website and did my best to make it look better.

What we are after is a completely new and fresh look. A design that conforms to a wider layout, specifically for 1024 screens, not 800. Unfortunately the client does not want to change his current logo so we need to work with that. Other than that here are some guidelines. If you look at the site www.vitacost.com that is along the lines of what we are after, but not as "busy" or crowded. There are basically 3 components that could be integrated on a side bar, such as top brands, top categories, each with a list of about 10. Look at www.vitaminworld.com See on the left how they have the Top Categories, Top Brands. That is kind of what we are after. Also, somewhere on the every page should be a nice search box as well as the "Customer Options" you see on his current site in the top right. Insofar as the main navigation you can pretty much disregard what is currently on the site. We do want some reference on the page for "New Products" and somehow linking to "Health Article Library" or "Health Articles".  Finally, there should be a space provided for banner ads such as you see on the site now. A fixed dimension is ok for these ads so disregard the varying sizes you  see now. GO with something standard, like 450 x 50 (is that a standard banner size?).  I also really like the large graphic on the home page of vitaminworld.com that reads "20% - 50% Off Storewide". That looks nice. My client also likes when displaying his products that images of bottles are of a decent size. On his home page if you scroll down you will see two columns. On a larger layout maybe 3 colums would work.

We do not want anything too flashy or too crowded. People should not be overwhelmed upon landing on his site. My client is old school (see his picture on the site) and believes people like a "simple" look. So if possible give a simple,clean, and fresh look for the site. Thanks! I will have him offering feedback on layouts during the contest (not using private messages) under each entry. Thanks.

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