News site and Blog

Design the homepage and main blog page of a mortgage news website. A site mock-up (including design and site map) has already been completed, and we need a designer to provide PCL Marketing with a more professional, modern, user friendly, and eye catching design for the two pages. Let your creative inspiration run wild. We would love to see your vision for the next great news site and Blog.

LenderNews

LenderNews needs to be designed to be the preeminent News site and Blog for the mortgage industry. Currently, the mock-ups have been pieced together from other existing sites whose design we liked. We need the new design to have a very professional, clean, modern look and feel, with a very high user friendly interface. Refer to the page descriptions and site map/navigation structure listed below.

I need a new design for the following pages of my website:
- News/Homepage: The news homepage includes three main components:
- 5 categories of news headlines.  The categories can be designed to only include the headline, or a headline accompanied by the first sentence of text.  The following site is an example of the headline functionality we will be utilizing on the site: http://www.mortgagenews2.com  
News widget that displays headlines and is downloadable. The following links show good examples of a news widget design:

http://www.newsgatorwidgets.com/

http://www.businessweek.com/downloa…index.html
Financial data chart: The following link shows the layout of the chart we will be using.  The chart can be redesigned to match the color of the site, as well as include the LenderNews logo.  http://www.thefinancials.com/syndic…tgage.html

Also included on the homepage needs to be the following:
- Links to the most recent blog posts
- Links to the white paper library or individual white papers Use the mock-up example as a guide for creating the design of the homepage. The new design can differ from the mock-up, but needs to include everything on this page which is found at 

http://www.filefactory.com/file/7b7…mepage_bmp

Sub page:
- BlogThe Blog will need to include the following:
- Archive
- Categories
- Multiple authors
- Blog widget (most recent/most popular posts)
- The first page of the Blog should contain the most recent posts, either full text of 1-2 paragraphs of the post. The following are mock-ups of designs for the main Blog page, and they should be used as a guide for the design:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/0eb…mePage_bmp
http://www.filefactory.com/file/a59…epage2_bmp
http://www.filefactory.com/file/e61…epage3_bmp

The LenderNews Blog should be designed to function like the following Blogs:

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com

http://blog.clickz.com  
- The navigation, except for slight variations in the blog's structure, should be consistent on the Blog and Homepage.
- The Blog and Homepage designs should match. The following should be on both the blog and homepage:
- Search bar
- One advertisement (no horizontal banner style ads)
- Subscribe icon for RSS, Newsletter and News UpdatesSite Map/Navigation:
- NewsNew Home/Homepage
        All Mortgage News
        Mortgage Technology News
        Compliance
        Government and Economy
        Secondary Marketing
- BlogBlog home
     Archive
     Author
     Mortgage banking operations
     Secondary marketing
     Compliance
     Technology
     Vendor management

               Individual posts

                       Send Feedback
                       Send post to colleague

The following are the main sub pages that also need to be included in design of the navigation structure and functionality:
- Resources
- Events
- Directory
- Data and Statistics
- Newsletter/RSS
- Do More with LenderNews          News Widget
          Toolbar
- Contact Us
- About Us
- Privacy Policy
- Copyright
- How to Advertise

- Title- "LenderNews"
- Tagline- "Mortgage Industry News, Advice, and Resources"
- Very clean, professional, and user friendly. The target market is mortgage lenders.
- The site will be developed using a content management system (Wordpress), so make the design be able to code and function properly for a CMS/Blogging Tool.

- The homepage should have limited images.  If images are used they will need to be static, and should convey the site theme, as they will not be updated regularly.  The news will be generated by headlines and accompanying text (1-2 sentences) only.