A New Look For A Non-profit Charity Site! - Need help with an overall site design. (not the coding btw)

Hi everyone!
(Mods- sorry if this sort of request is in the wrong area, it seemed to be the most reasonable place when I looked! If it is, please do move it somewhere else! )
Our brains are fried trying to think of any possible web designs for a charitable, sort of fund raising program underway by a group of friends (mainly for helping out the homeless by providing paid jobs for them with running a buisness.) This is kinda a new idea, although we have been working hard to get something like this to help out the (trustworthy) homeless around the reading area. This has been a project as a group of friends over a rather long time, although we just lost one of our group to a different college (which turned out to be in our favour, he was a good friend though!). He was being rather unrealistic and just generally pulling things down. Because of his bad organisation a £1,700 fund raising climb (all money had been sponsored and totalled) had to be called off. Twice!. It never actually happened. Anyway... Moans over, now we can continue...
Basicly, we need a website up and running to get support, but none of us have any ideas that are any good for site layout or just the overall design. I don't mean to ask for any coding or website building to be done, maybe just knock up a template in photoshop or something that looks good. (I'll take it from there and put it into web format ). As of now the name of the charity is SecondLife (although we may change it due to legal reasons or in favour of a more catchy title!) We don't really have a logo, but room to put a logo in would be useful, maybe at the top or sides of a page.

What we would like is a navigation area of the page, maybe in a dedicated box along the left side, with another box somewhere, possibly just below that? for latest news bulletins. If you think it would be a good idea to get some sort of banner made up to fill a band across the top of the screen, or the part to the right of any nav boxes please say so and I'll get working on it. (I think this would be a good idea). The rest of the stuff - colours, (background texture?), boxes or borders need to be sorted and thats pretty much what we need help deciding on, along with the layout of these things, like where boxes should be to look good etc.. As I said, It'd be great if you could put together a visual layout or something in photoshop (or anything else for that matter) that we could use as our design!
(Credit would go to whomever helped us out majorly, with respect plastered on the site to them as well!!! ;D)

We already have most of the content and pages down on paper and we're just waiting for slow old me to get a site ready to lob it all into!

We all would appreciate it very, very much if someone would help us out by getting a nice look for our site, and maybe even help us out by sponsoring the reincarnation of the twice failed climb - Details will be found on the site when it goes! (I'll probably start another topic somewhere else to get interest! )
Thanks in advance; Ben, James and the team!

 

 

 

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I might be able to whip up something for you

I dont know exactly waht you want but im guessing maybe do some stuff with lighter colors (looks more profesional) whites, greys/silvers and so on to have it be sort of a welcome to the site feel and that sort of stuff

but anyways ill see what i can do for you

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Just an idea... but it is attached, if you want something changed tell me or if you hate it just say so...
email me at crh431[at]gmail.com.

Click to view attachment

 

 

 

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just a note

imo thats very simple and by the looks of it he has multiple pages so meh..

ill post something a little later for you to check out

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Have you done some research and looked in other Charity Sites, and took notes there sites as to what catchs your eyes, ask other peoples opionions to a site. If you get the right combination of things for the website, it will look better then one your looking from your point of view!

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I'm bored, I might try this out. No guarantees though.

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allright i was really bored so heres a full site/template

http://www.kensiski.org/tdk/secondlife/

and you can download the files at http://www.kensiski.org/tdk/secondlife/secondlife.zip

btw if you dont like it thats fine no hurt feelings i understand

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Sorry for such a slow response back on my part when you all replied so quickly! Thanks tdktank, you were dead right with the background colours idea and making it more like a welcome to the site . As I said in the PM, the light, gray kinda silvery colours in your design seem to work well and are easy on the eyes, which is always a good thing! I'm not so sure about the logo space in the top left, and would rather it was in the form of a banner (not too fat of course), but nice ideas.
Monsieur Voyagers! - i like the graded shades merging and the lines that fade out, it makes the page look quite smooth. i won't lie, I think those background colours are pretty horribly putrid!, but those are the easiest things to change anyway and its only in the design stage. I'd quite like to use those sort of graded lines and the gradually changing background colours as they look pretty cool, just not those ones!

For any further developments or layout ideas from people, the site should have a quite sleek feel, and be easy on the eyes, clean, with fairly light background colours, just mostly it shouldn't really look bland (which is the hardest thing to get with a clean looking site )

It'd be great if you could try this out johnny! Go on... you know you want to! maybe following on from the idea of a design with sleek banner space along the top, with the sort of left navigation and the light-ish colours in tdk's design!
And TDk you know I love almost all of your design for this! don't be silly... It rocks, just needs to rock a little, little bit more!
Thanks once again guys (and gals) Its great to have such speedy replies.. I only posted this at 10:30 last night! All the help is greatly appreciated as time is of the essence!

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Any more ideas from anyone to improve over the two designs we've got already...
Heres a kinda update incorporating Tdk's design I modded earlier. I've only really had time to do the banner and links setup, and its put together in paint cos I'm really poor with photoshop. (Tdk's photoshop files are above though if you feel like looking over them) As I say the only thing I've managed to do is the banner with links.
Appreciate it if people could say whether they like the main pages' horizontal links bar or not, in relation to the banner...
P.S. Pic of cat is just a temporary measure!!! it will probably morph into a suitable homeless person (willing of course!!)
i was also thinking it might look better if the whole window was made a screen size bigger, maybe to the most common 1024x768 res??? is this a reasonable idea?
Oh - any more ideas of how to spice up the rest of the page (and my poor effort of banner too!)???
My modded version is attached: if I can get this to work :E

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Well, for one, "Navigation" is spelled wrong on that one.

But as for the actual design, I think it's a bit too blocky. No offense to anyone, but it seems like a plain geocities-style template, which won't exactly appeal to potential "clients" or what have you.

The text is kind of plain, and it looks like it varies slightly between the three headers (SecondLife, Navigation, News) Also, the copyright at the bottom looks like a button, which doesn't exactly flow with the rest of the page, which is flat (not in a bad way, flat sites are great)

The edges of the "template area" should have a border or something if the background is going to be non-white, since currently it kind of cuts straight from greyish to white.

ANYWAY, I'll stop there since I feel like I might be cutting some people down, which I really don't mean to do.

If I have time I might make a [very] rough outline later on, but I'm kinda busy all day, so still no guarantees.

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