Redesign the "German Society for Evaluation"

DeGEval - Gesellschaft für Evaluation e.V.

DeGEval could roughly be translated as "German Society for Evaluation". The "e.V." stands for "registered society", which implies it´s "non-profit" character.
It aims to bring together professionals (institutional and private) engaged in the scientific field of "Eavulation" (in this sense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evalua…valuation).

DeGEval members are recruited from renowned economic and
social scientific research institutes, institutes of higher education,
consulting and political consulting agencies, ministries,
administration departments, and federal research institutes.

All the relevant disciplines and professions are represented
and the number of members is increasing continually.

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We need to completely redesign the existing website, giving it a clean while distinctive new identity. You can visit the "old" site here: http://degeval.de/

Just to let you know: The new site has been decided to run Joomla as a cms. For our newsletters we plan to use mailchimp. Of course this should not restrain your design efforts in any way.

The website of DeGEval offers information and services mainly for the following groups of people:

- members of DeGEval (individuals and institutions)
- individuals and institutions interested in and engaged with evaluation
- agencies, ministries and administration departments in need of professional advice and guidance concerning evaluation processes and projects in theory and practice
- everybody trying to keep up-to-date with the recent development, theorizing and practice of evaluation

We want you to design a new frontpage first. Based on the outcome we will ask some of you to design subpages as well, if we are really pleased with your work. In general we would appreciate to work with the winner later to design additional pages.

If the winner would also be able to do the html/css coding or even Joomla coding this could also be arranged separately but is absolutely not a prerequisite to join this contest and will not at all affect our decision, when selecting a winner!

Content: As you can see there is a lot of content in quite a deep hierarchy. Please keep this in mind, when deciding on menu style and/or placement.

Please use the old sites menu items terms.
A translation of the menu items:
News, About us, Working Groups, DeGEval-Standards, Publications, Events, Links, FAQ, Contact

Color: The new site should retain blue as one of the main colors but it doesn´t have to be as dominant as on the old site, where it is just combined with white. You should come up with a fresh new color schema that could have other colors (1-2) matching the blue.

Logo: The logo has to stay like it is now. I will give you a link to a better version soon.

I am about to gather a small list of sites, my client likes, but these should not be too much of a model for you. Getting the idea and coming up with something really great and individual is the key.

As the amount of text is quite limited here, I will give you more information on an external page very soon.

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Addition: feel free to change the layout as you like!
What we have now is actually what a lot of sites had about 10 years ago i.e. the classical three-column-layout (maybe even chosen based on the restricted possibilities of the old CMS).
A creative solution for the menu would really be appreciated. Keep in mind, that there are a lot of subpages going possibly three levels deep. Therefor a split menu solution may come to mind, where the first level is in a horizontal top menu and the submenu in a sidebar area. But this is just an idea.
In general think about usability in the first place. Visitors should easily be able to get orientation without having to guess which menu contains what.
Of course this is more important for subpages but the frontpage is also connected to the subpages, isnt´t it.

You can also include some images on the frontpage. Candidates are thumbnails on news items, small images in a sidebar and maybe a banner area, if you want to include one in your proposal. Using a nice matching icon-set is also an option!

Keep in mind: The most important things for a harmonic solution are layout, color scheme and font choice. :-)