Create the next Web Page Design for Maple Leaf Metals Exchange

Maple Leaf Metals Exchange

Maple Leaf Metals Exchange is a newly formed bullion dealer in Canada. We will be selling physical gold, silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium to customers for investment and wealth preservation purposes.

http://www.mapleleafmetals.ca

Maple Leaf Metals Exchange Inc. is 100% Canadian owned and operated. The Maple Leaf itself is an important aspect of the company as it is a national cultural symbol as well as what is stamped in to highly recognizable bullion coins produced by the Royal Canadian Mint. These ties should feature strongly in the website.

Site imagery could consist of gold/silver bars, the minting process, the Royal Canadian Mint etc. It could also show jewelry, gold sculptures or historical artifacts/events.

Some other themes associated with this firm should be the long history of gold and silver being used as a universal money (all international trade had been conducted in precious metals from the dawn of human history up until the US dollar, unbacked by gold, became the world reserve currency in 1971), the stability of its value over time, the beauty of the metal itself as well as its cultural importance (gold is highly prized by Indians, for example). An overview of the history of gold can be found at the Facebook link below and other info at the World Gold Council.

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?no…6940372986
http://www.gold.org

The following website is of a competitor dealer. You can get some basic ideas about what goes on a bullion dealers websites but I leave it up to the designer to take as much liberty as they like with the actual design for Maple Leaf Metals. I want the site to be intuitive and not cluttered, as I find this site to be a bit of an overload.

http://www.cachemetals.com

Designers can use the list of sites at the following link to get an idea of layouts and use of graphics.

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/gall…-websites/

We will be needing two page designs. A homepage and content page.

The homepage should be clean and professional looking, as well as serve as the central navigation hub for the website. I would like to have a news feed there, where I can put links to recent news stories as well as a price chart that will show the current spot prices of the metals we sell. It should also let users know of our flat-rate shipping policy ($30 shipping on all orders up to $100,000) and give users quick access to the other main areas of the website.

The content page will be used as a template to fill in each section page's content (About Us, Browse, About Bullion, FAQ and Contact sections that could each have multiple subsections that users can navigate to). It should retain the price chart because I would like to always have that displayed but can otherwise look however the designer feels is most attractive.

See the following link and scroll down to "SP-6" to see the chart that I would like included on the website and the instructions on how to embed it.
http://www.kitco.com/price/

Our customers could be anyone from small individual purchasers, to large institutional clients. So the look and feel of the site should have a broad appeal and attract customers of all backgrounds. Trust is the key element and the site will need to make a good impression.