Baby Naming Website

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT US:

The website design is for a California LLC, Above the Fold Interactive, LLC, formed in 2006 - the domain name is ohbabynames.com. My name is Julie Hackett, a co-founder and partner in the LLC. I have worked in Internet Advertising Sales since 1996 (having sold over half a billion dollars worth of online advertisements in my career) before becoming a successful Internet entreprenuer in my own right. This product (the baby naming website) is really a five-year passion of interest which I have been working on and ready to get serious about. I have developed over 10,000 pages of content for the website and am at the place where I simply need a home page and some inner page website designs to bring the content and back end web development to life.

HERE IS WHAT WE NEED:

I need a "front door" to my content that will keep users at the website. Picture a furniture store, if you will. I am in control of the furniture selection and making sure I have what the customers want, so they stay. Your job is to create the store-front. The aesthetic quality of the store that people walk into and say "what a quality store; I trust the proprietors immediately and I know just how to find what I am looking for; let me browse around for a long while!" because the store is beautiful and intuitively laid out. The lighting is perfect. The colors on the wall are appealing. In other words, I need you to catch the users attention and imagination. I want them to feel comfortable and at ease on my website; I want them to have fun and enjoy this moment of research. Naming a baby is perhaps one of the most wonderful decisions in a person's life. It is serious business but it is also fun.

OUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS:

The audience will be mainly expectant mothers (assume 50%). HOWEVER, the audience will also be friends and family of expectant mothers and a smaller percentage of fathers. I also expect some interest from the general population and teens just looking up the meanings of their name. So I don't want a little "cutesie" website that is too babyish. I want it to be soft and lovely, easy on the eyes and appealing universally, but not all geeked out with blues and pinks, which I think is unoriginal. This is a combination of a serious site of content (etymology information of name origin) but also a baby naming resource. Not just expectant mothers, but it should be appealing to the masses given the depth of content.

WE LIKE THESE EXAMPLES:

I honestly do not like any of the baby naming resources available right now. Should you "google" baby names, you'll find a lot of mediocre sites and thin information compared with what I think should be available. I want something that will stand out - not in a garish way - but more simple, with good colors and fonts (hey, you're the expert, not me).

WE ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THIS IN OUR PIECE:

I have some wireframes (albeit, amateurish), but should give you an idea of where we're going with this. I mainly want a kick-ass home page, and a great "name page" idea. Maybe a couple templates from which we can redesign other inner pages. I am including the logo too; might be a good place to start. And more detail of the different elements of the site.