FUN PROJECT: Vintage Postcards and Collectibles Site Redesign

CardCow.com Vintage Postcards and Collectibles

This contest is for the basic layout & design of the site. Submit an initial design for the home page, or a product page, and I will provide feedback. You should also take button design into consideration ("Search", "Add to Cart", etc.)

The winner will need to provide the layout for those two pages, but you can concentrate on one for your initial design and I will focus on the ones I like best. I would like a designer that I can work with on additional pages after the contest (flat fee or hourly).

Home Page: http://www.cardcow.com/
Typical Product Page: http://www.cardcow.com/161863/ w/Tall Image http://www.cardcow.com/117892/
Product Page with a lot of text: http://www.cardcow.com/26935/

Pretty simple - We sell vintage postcards (and "stock" images of those
postcards).

Adjectives would be: fun, interesting, historic, retro, vintage,
quirky, offbeat, nostalgic, classic

Don't pay too much attention to our current design. It sucks, and I want something more or less completely fresh.

Sites I like (decent product pages):
http://www.etsy.com/
http://www.modcloth.com/ (Too feminine for us, but nice design)
http://www.kaboodle.com/ (not bad)

Sites I DON'T like:
http://goo.gl/Bp8H
http://goo.gl/ARfM
(Both too "antique", too "old" looking)
Ebay (need I say more?)

Email me directly at 99designs@cardcow.com if you have questions or contact me through the site here.

We have a *broad* target audience. Age range would be 20-60+, so we're not really targeting kids or teens.
We get a wide variety of customers ranging from serious collectors, to nostalgia buffs & historians, people buying gifts, advertising, graphic artists, etc. But we have a lot of folks that just happen upon the site and we'd like to allow them to easily browse product images.

Go for something more fun than serious. It needs to look professional, but not cliché. Clean, not cluttered.

Search:
Search is integral to the site. The search box will be at the top of every page. It should be fairly big & bold - kind of like google or http://www.toysrus.com/

Navigation:
Users need to be able to browse the category taxonomy easily. I'm not tied to the large left-hand nav like we have now. We will probably add some more toplevel categories (Postcards, Sports Cards, Trade Cards, Photographs, etc.) So those could be dynamic dropdown lists, which would free up more space on the main page for other things.

Ads:
Layout must take ads into consideration. We typically have at least two ad units on each page. Google's ad formats are here:
https://www.google.com/adsense/stat…l?hl=en_US

If you know of a current site or feature example that you think I might like, ping me and I'll let you know. Might save some time before you spend too much time on this...

Required deliverables are:
Two complete example page layouts (Home page and Product Page)
layered PSD is fine, Dreamweaver preferred. Will pay additional if you can do the slicing/CSS/HTML in dreamweaver.

I can do any javascript/server-side development, I just need you to make it look good and give me something I can customize from a UI perspective.

Home Page:
Must show at least 10 "Featured Cards" which change weekly, they could be broken down into several groups or categories if necessary.

Product Page:
Most product pages have two pictures - the front and back of a card. The large image of the front must be shown, along with the thumbnails. Your design should incorporate most of the elements on my current product pages (next/prev product, city/state/other attributes.

Logo:
A large Logo is attached, you'll probably want to resize it down. I'm flexible with changing the colors (I'm not totally committed to the brown/orange), and we can change the logo format slightly if necessary.

Technical Requirements:
Think "fast, compact, and easy to change"
No Flash
Consistent header/footer/border that can be applied to all pages on the site

Screen resolution: Should look acceptable in 1024x768 but the overall layout can be larger. No wider than 1280