VotefortheBest.com - FAST Growing Site Redesign

VotefortheBest.com

VotefortheBest.com is a local business review website with a twist. The site allows visitors to vote on their favorite places in any city in the U.S. in over 150 categories, including best sushi, best margarita, best sports bar and more. Our unique twist is that the site aggregates votes from every city in the country to a State and National level, so you can find the Best Sushi Restaurant in your state or even the Best Sushi Restaurant in the country, for example.

The site was launched two months ago and while we like our current design we feel we can improve the user experience by changing the site layout. So, we are restructuring our site and are looking for a creative designer to provide a fresh, web 2.0 inspired design.

Our target audience is web-savvy, 25-55 males and females. We are looking to attract current users of Yelp and CitySearch.

We will need a design for the homepage and one interior page. We like our site's current look and feel, but we are open to your creative interpretation. Go to http://www.voteforthebest.com to see the current design.

The site design should be simple and clean, yet have a slight edge and/or quirkiness to it. Everything is vote-themed - "nominate a business", "most active polls", etc. - but we don't want the design to be overly patriotic. We would like designers to play with iconic voting themes, such a ballot boxes, ballot cards, etc..

We have attached wireframes to the project, so you don't need to waste time thinking about how to lay out the site.

Our current site has a blue header bar, but we are not attached to that. We would actually like to see some designs with a white header and good use of white space.

Please use these sites for design cues:
http://www.meetup.com
http://www.gowalla.com