LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT US:

Our company, Marcato Digital Solutions, is a small startup based out of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. We're made up of musicians, managers, and festival directors, and our software comes from our experience in those worlds. We've created a web application that lets you manage your music & arts festivals from the ground up. It's basically a CMS tailored to track things like shows and workshops, artists, venues, and generate all kinds of useful reports, integrate with your website, etc. Check it out here: http://marcatoapp.com/web/festival.php

Our company website is: http://marcatodigital.com

HERE IS WHAT WE NEED:

We need a professional website that will help us sell our web-based festival management software to music & arts festivals. We already have a number of large festivals using our software to run their entire events. We have a company website designed by one of our programmers (http://marcatodigital.com), but we've never really been that in love with it, and would like to get a fresh new look with this product's website.

Our logo isn't set in stone (as you can see from the different versions), so feel free to play around a little. Please keep the red square with the white icon (a 'marcato' accent: http://www.acesandeighths.com/pictures/M...

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SITE LAYOUT

Home - the landing page. this page should include a big call to action about why our web app will make managing a festival so much easier. Don't worry about the actual copy, we're still tweaking it ourselves. We also need to include a big screenshot/video carousel here, to give people a quick view of the app itself. See the Bandize site for a good example of this. it would also be nice to fit a preview of the latest few blog posts/announcements somewhere on this page, and we need a few little boxes that describe major selling points, with icons to grab your attention. this page makes up the bulk of the site, and the rest of the pages are much cleaner and straight forward.

Features & Pricing - this page will be a list of specific features, with links to screenshots, and a pricing chart that compares the 'lite' and 'pro' versions of the software.

Sign Up - this page is where people go to sign up for a demo account, similar to this page: http://marcatoapp.com/web/signup_musicia...

Contact - a basic contact page, including e-mails, phone #s, the usual

Clients - this page could be a list of our current festival clients with quotes from their directors, similar to this: http://marcatoapp.com/web/clients.php

News (this will be a blog / announcements page) - a typical blog with comments and links to retweet a post, etc. the latest post or two will also show up on the landing page.

We'd like to include a login box (e-mail & password) somewhere on landing page for existing customers. Maybe tucked away in the top right corner or somewhere conventional like that.

We have a similar product for managing bands called Marcato Musician, and you can see an abandoned attempt at this product's website here: http://marcatodigital.com/musician-mocku...

OUR TARGET AUDIENCE IS:

We are trying to appeal to Music & Arts festivals of all sizes. A major concept behind our software is that it relieves a lot of the 'pain' of directing and managing a large festival, eg. it drastically reduces the paper work, replaces those huge reply-all email threads, and the constantly out-of-date word documents and contracts. We want our customers to know that we are also musicians and festival directors and that we understand their world and their problems from experience.

Check out some of the festivals already using our software:

The East Coast Music Awards - http://www.ecma.com/

The Stan Rogers Folk Festival - http://www.stanfest.com/

Luminato, the Toronto Festival of Arts & Creativity - http://www.luminato.com/

WE LIKE THESE DESIGNS:

http://bandcamp.com/

When you're selling a web app, you kind of need to include screenshots or movies on the landing page to show people how your software actually works. These guys do it well.

http://www.mint.com/ & http://www.apple.com/

Nice, clean designs. Our company is made up of mac nerds.

http://bandize.com/

This site is great. It makes good use of javascript to pack a lot of information into one page. The landing page is pretty much an entire site in one page.

WE ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE THIS IN OUR DESIGN:

Crisp, vibrant colours, and some icons to help us draw attention to different features. Our software uses a lot of red, light grey, and dark grey gradients, but we're open to new things. We would like a nice, rich blast of red somewhere on the page, to match the logo. There's some sample copy in an attached file to play around with.