crowdSPRING

Creative brief

People who run businesses are being asked to comply with an ever increasing amount of government regulation. There are so many regulations it’s hard to know where to start. Some of the rules seem crazy. But the penalties for not complying range from warnings to fines or even prison sentences.

This website is going to help the people who run our small and medium sized businesses. It’ll let them know what regulations are relevant to them, how they should tackle them and where to go for further help. This means less worry for them and more time to do what they're best at - running their businesses!

The site will have a panel of volunteer experts who will answer questions, discuss regulations and maybe even campaign for better ones.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Look And Feel

The website must feel like an authoritative source. It is not just another news or magazine site.

It will be a great tool for our visitors but we need a way for them to quickly understand what the site offers. It will be a design challenge to make the site appear easy to use without making it appear lightweight or trivial.

The users may not be IT literate (many will be entrepreneurs and senior business people) so navigation should be simple and design clean. It must be clear at all times where you are on the site (by using a breadcrumb trail).

-------------------------------------------------------------

Design Constraints

The site will be built with a Content Management System (Drupal) so all content will appear in discrete blocks as in the prototype and example websites (see below).

Text must be used wherever possible (even in the site title, block titles, navigation, tabs, etc) and your chosen font(s) should be universally available to all browsers.

There will be very few graphics except for the logo and the icons listed below and there are very few photos in the content. It will be a challenge to make such a text heavy site look good.

There will be no advertising on the site but the header must have room for a sponsor’s logo which should be highly visible but not overpowering.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Reference Sites

To give you an idea of the page content & site structure, there's a prototype site:
- www.gtees.com/prototype/

Other sites built with Content Management Systems include:
- news.bbc.co.uk,
- theworld.org
- amnesty.org.

-------------------------------------------------------------

3 Pages Are Required

- Front page (www.gtees.com/prototype/)
- Expert Directory page (www.gtees.com/prototype/16_Expert_Contributors.html)
- Individual Expert page (www.gtees.com/prototype/17_Expert_Individual.html)

-------------------------------------------------------------

Technical

Images Required
- a simple logo (and associated favicon)
- probably no background image(s) / patterns
- no graphics for navigation (must be text)
- no animations

Size
- 1024x768, centered
- three fixed width columns. A thin column on the left, and two fat columns (center and right) which should be the same width as each other
- the thin column is for navigation, the fat columns are for content
- content blocks can flow across the two fat columns

Page Structure
- ‘Register and ‘Log In’ options should appear only on the home page. On the other pages please assume the user is signed in and adjust the header to show this.
- the left navigation column is identical on all pages except the home page: it has a menu block and a filter block.

Colors & Fonts
- plain text, visited and unvisited hyperlinks
- text input boxes and textarea's
- pulldowns, radio buttons and checkboxes
- lists of items
The sizes and names of all fonts used will be required.

Icons
- favicon
- a bullet/arrowhead icon for lists
- a second bullet/arrowhead icon for lists
- number icons ‘1’ to ‘9’ for numbered lists
- search button icon
- left arrow & right arrow for calendar
- an opinion poll icon
- a toolbox icon
- an events icon
- printer icon for printing the page
- icon for sending email
- icon for linking to this page
- RSS icon
- help icon
- ‘twistee’ icon for displaying / hiding filter options. A plus (+) and minus (–) were used in the prototype

Hope this helps. Any questions, please ask.

And many thanks for looking at this project!

Gordon.

Update 15-Sep-08, 11:10pm GMT

It's after midnight in London and there's less than 6 hours to run on this project. I'm afraid I won't be able to provide feedback on any other entries before the project ends - I gotta sleep!

I want to thank everyone who asked questions, everyone who mailed useful advice and, most of all, everyone who submitted posts. The standard has been unbelievable high. Much higher than I dared hope. I'd recommend CrowdSpring to anyone.

As for the winning post - I will get back to you all with my decision within 24 hours. And thanks again!

Gordon.