Leading Diving Website needs new coded design template

The current design at DeeperBlue.net (done by Sitepoint I may add!) is now 4 years old. Time for some fresh ideas!

Tagline:
Fanatical About FreeDiving, Scuba Diving, Spearfishing and Technical Diving

Desired Color Scheme:
Blue(s) and White

Accepted File Formats:
Fully coded HTML + any images

DeeperBlue.net, one of the leading websites around for diving enthusiasts (scuba diving, freediving, spearfishing, etc...) is looking for a new look.

We've been running for 11 years and the current design (done by the guys behind Sitepoint actually) is now looking a little tired.

I'm keen to get a new fresh look to the site, but without introducing any new real features (yet!). Stage 1 is just to get a consistent branding across all the parts of the site.

I want designers to use the existing logo and keep with the rough idea of colour scheme as per the original site (i.e. blue's of different shades as well as white).

Some key aspects i'd like to see:

- Clean layout with good use of whitespace

- Do not try to introduce new features that don't already exist on the current site.

- Main navigation along the top

- Ideally a full page width design (especially for the banner and navigation area)

- The design should fit with all areas of the site (see site area list below)

- I do not want heavy use of graphics, all navigation should be text based where possible.

- Not all parts of the site will use the whole template so key areas (header & footer) need to be reusable easily)

- Bear in mind where adverts currently exist on the site however I am willing to reposition adverts on a new design so long as it fits (bear in mind that not all parts of the site carry adverts)

- We are looking for a fully coded template at the end.

- Use this logo (convert where necessary) - http://www.deeperblue.net/images/lo…-white.jpg or http://www.deeperblue.net/images/lo…-White.png

Other than that i'd like some level of creativity.

Here are some sites I like the design of as a starting point:

http://www.sitepoint.com (of course!) - i love this design

http://www.problogger.net - i love this design as well

http://www.technorati.com/

https://www.blogger.com/start

http://www.flickr.com/

http://sports.yahoo.com/

http://espn.go.com/

http://www.theonion.com/content/index

 

Current DeeperBlue.net Site List:

http://www.deeperblue.net

http://forums.deeperblue.net

http://gallery.deeperblue.net

http://www.deeperblue.net/courses

http://shop.deeperblue.netÂ