Bringing cool design & tools to the shipping industry

ShipGooder

We are the most used shipping rates search engine on the internet, with over 1.3 million rates searches last year. We want to bring consumers and businesses the simplest and best tool to make good shipping decisions. Our site has been around now for 31/2 years and is growing every year. Our desire is to bring value to the end-user and the courier, so that everyone benefits from using and being involved in our site. We are a team of 5 and have a real family feel to our business. We always say making money doing something we like with people that we like. Again we are emphasizing value to the end-user as well as extra value to those who subscribe to our site.

Our end-user target audience is primarily businesses (smb) and consumers and we are wanting to create an "Online Business Shipping Center" that will bring enough value to them to get them to subscribe. They are primarily business that are too small to have enterprise shipping software or back-office solutions but are frequent shippers, so we want to provide those enterprise tools to this audience at a small subscription price. The next audience is just attracting consumers (family sending to family, etc...) that have one-off shipping and can use our site to find the best rates and service for their needs. This market is really time driven (Christmas, and other holidays) but also will increase our traffic, which brings value to our third audience, the couriers themselves. Couriers can participate with us in two ways: list on our directory or subscribe and put their services and rates on our site. Then we can connect our end-users with couriers to fulfill their shipping needs. Really we are heavily into the referral business.

Clean look and feel - in other words want to change the look of the current site which is industrial to a simple but functional site. Want consistency to be maintained throughout the site. Consistency in colors, playing off of the current logo. Want to maintain the value of our rates search engine but provide an attractive site that is easy to navigate and emphasizes who we are - a site that helps end-users make the best shipping decisions... The rates result page is a table which we want to allow for better design but must be able to display the current number of columns and rows. Navbar on top but shapes and colors are to your discretion, drop-down for sub menu items under each heading or any other way that you would want to display the sub-menu items, Links below the the main section to be more than just words but want to see some design treatment to them as well. Place holders for images on all inside pages and on the ads sections to the right of every page, no more than 3 ads but no less than 2. Section for quick tips, or news above the ads that would be easily seen by the user. Navigation to be simple and easy.

3

1. Homepage - Nav-bar on top with drop-down sub-menus, logo upper left, shipping info entry left justified, ads on the right side, above the ads a section to put in tips or text of any kind, links below the shipping info window, interchangeable, keywords for seo to be on the bottom as well with links to other information pages, sign-in boxes upper right with username and password (see mock-up) and log-in button, sign-up link that would go to a form for business subscribers to sign-up for the service, footer with copyright, etc...
2. Generic inside page - standard so all inside pages would be consistent, left justified with ads on the right, navbar the same as homepage, consistent fonts, consistent header and footer like homepage, image placeholders to add images to every inside page
3. Rate Results Page - Clean, rates table to be left justified (please refer to current site for example), ads on the right, want to show how the table info is displayed (fastest to slower service - left to right & lowest to highest price - up to down) maybe arrows alongside describing this, keep check boxes for courier display options

http://www.shipgooder.com - right now it is too industrial want it to look more modern and inviting - like the emphasis of our value right on the homepage which allows the end-user to enter their shipping info and immediately get the best rates and service - don't like the lack of color on the site and the old-fashioned fonts

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