Empowered Design

Contest summary

Looking for a fresh, compelling, and professional design for my website

Target Audience

Target audience is pretty broad: corporations and mid-size companies, those mandated to do diversity work (ie. law enforcement, non-profits etc.), schools and educators, universities and colleges, anyone who has a diverse staff or works with the public and is interested in learning how to turn diversity into their biggest asset, and work effectively with diverse populations. I am also targeting anyone interested in expanding their knowledge and understanding of social justice issues, and building their capacity in this area(i.e. teachers who want to integrate this into their practice, non-profit organizations wanting to do outreach) **I offer special rates to non-profits, percentage of profits to organizations working for social justice.

Designer guidelines

My current website can be found at http://empoweronline.ca The things I like about it are: my header/logo, the colour scheme (which is exactly the colour scheme of my business cards) and that is about it. The ‘turning picture’ gives me a massive headache every time I look at it. I don't want people to have to scroll down to see content. I would like menus to be possible, I would like to write a blog entry every day, and for that to be the home page. I want to be able to have some kind of diagnostics/tracking tool, or capability for that, and facebook and twitter and share buttons or capabilities for those plugins. I want a really clean look, I am much more text-oriented than image-oriented, but I want to be able to put some images and video. I want my logo and colour scheme to stay pretty much the same, though it does not have to be exact, since this business is very very new, and therefore hasn’t been fully branded yet. I want a slightly businessy/corporatey feel, but softer somehow at the same time. This is a business, but it is also a business about social responsibility and social justice and trying to help people, so I want that to come across. I want organizations to get the sense that if they work with us they are going to be equipped with a superpower that is going to open their eyes and transform the organization in new ways! So along with the homepage/blog, other page ideas are "Diversity" "Workplace" "Schools and Educators" "Research and Consulting," "Contact". But if it was possible, I'd like to have drop down menus for each of these, for example in Schools and Educators there might be a drop down for teachers, for youth, for learning resources, for clients and projects etc." There was just no way to do something like that with the site I currently have. Except for the logo, which my friend did for me as a favour, I have not done much branding and I am working with a very limited budget, only one client so far, a non-profit. But I really believe in this business, and in how it can make relations between people better, and make workplaces, schools, and public services more equitable and effective, so I just want to get a website going that is really engaging and will draw people in. So, last thing, my favourite website ever is http://www.jessiecarlson.com/
This site is so clean, bright, subtle, simple but elegant, love the blog, love the drop downs, so simple, though mine would need more content to give context to my services, but I love this. A company that is sort of a large version of what I want to do is called Graybridge Malkam, they can be found at http://www.malkam.com/ I don't like the look of this site at all, feels way too busy to me, and is very crowded and not nice to look at, but the kinds of information and some of the headings they have are similar to what I am building. They are just on a much larger scale. So I want to give the mid-range company feel, but really inspire people to know they are dealing with a professional. I want to make the best first impression.

First impressions on our website should be

Professional, dynamic, clean, unique, easy to read and simple to navigate, visually engaging

We want this in our website

My logo which has been attached and is on the current version of the website as the header.

Additional comments for the designers

Right now the business is just me, and it is at the very beginning, so really want to start strong. I like simple, engaging, not too overwhelming, using some kind of blue and grey similar to the colours on the site now, but the way they are presented on the current site can definitely be changed. I am no expert, especially not with visuals, so I leave it in the capable hands of you designer folks. I am checking the contest at least twice a day, so I can give lots of feedback, and answer any questions or comments if there’s anything that is unclear. Looking forward to seeing the website come to life!