Net Industries necesitaba un nuevo diseño de página web y lanzó un concurso de diseño en 99designs.
Un ganador ha sido elegido entre 47 diseños de 20 diseñadores freelance.
StateUniversity.com c/o Net Industries, LLC.
School/university directory - features a catalog of colleges, universities, and elementary schools. Also includes rankings of schools based on certain metrics and overall score (like the popular USNews & World Report college rankings).
Anything "modern", in the same vein as http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ or the sites featured in top css galleries.
Home page (www.stateuniversity.com):
Needs to be "modernized" with a clean and modern style with plenty of eye candy for the high-school, college bound crowd. Basic elements of page need to stay the same (title, subtitle, "as mentioned by", ad unit, college search, school listings, etc.) but with better style. Should keep logo since it's part of the site identity as a whole (with sub-sites like careers.stateuniversity.com that we don't want to restyle now). The absolute top heading (the "stateuniversity" logo with the menu of encyclopedias and top-nav) should stay the same on the school profile pages but it's not required to remain on this home page if the links are incorporated further down the page under a masthead / banner image. If the links can't be incorporated near the top in a menu as described above then just leave it the same.
School profile page (ohio.stateuniversity.com):
Page header (very top menu) stays the same, but school header (title, subtitle, secondary school links, etc) and each data "section", article/narrative blocks of text, etc all need to still be present, but again better layout/style with same look-and-feel of new design on homepage. It's very important that the school name and header (section which includes the map, school name, and ad unit) stay prominent and high-visibility to user since it's a high point of revenue on the page currently.
For both pages HTML5 and modern css conventions are preferred. There was a lot of SEO work done originally on these pages so keeping the syntactical elements the same (h1's, h2's, general order of items on the page) is appreciated.
Emphasis should also be on page loading speed - so no flash or pages built heavily around large images. A very nice, graphic page header for the front page is fine though. Use mostly css to achieve any effect on the page - drop shadows, text shadows, curves, etc.