Wedding magazine website redesign

http://www.Bryllup.dk

Bryllup.dk is the largest wedding website in Scandinavia - 25.000+ users profiles and thousands of daily visitors use Bryllup.dk to plan their wedding and find inspiration and information about what to buy, do, arrange and so on. Until now, the site has mainly been a web 2.0 hybrid of facebook-like features and a forum. We now need to take it to the "next level".

We’re shifting focus at our weddingsite FROM being a user generated content based web 2.0 site TO being an editorial content based online magazine.

We need it to look like a magazine, with lots of images and text but with a touch of “newspaper”-style to it, as we publish A LOT of articles all the time.

Overall look: advertizement-driven online wedding magazine with a twist of web 2.0 but main focus is the editorial content.

“Advertizement-driven” because this is what keeps the site going as a business - ie. we need to make room for a certain amount of banner-ad’s

“Twist” because while the site is quite active in regards of users adding content (forums, images etc.) our “core” is still our written articles / editorial content. This is mainly 1.000 articles about wedding planning but also e-books to download.

Feel free to copy / paste content from the existing http://www.bryllup.dk to use in your mockup. We like the round, soft look of the site now, but we’re not happy with the existing look anymore.

Bridal couples between 25 and 35 year old, wedding guests and vendors of the wedding industry. It’s important not to scare the guys, or the wedding guests in general, away from using the site by having it all in screaming pink with curly fonts - the brides use the site most, measured in amount of TIME, but for every bride, we have aroung 60 wedding guests visiting the site (but in much less amount of time).

We have 4 article categories (bridal couple, wedding guests, vendors and press) and we’d like these 4 to have something to seperate them like diffent shades of background, a small icon or something like that.

We like the look of http://www.politiken.dk, http://www.avisen.dk and http://www.berlingske.dk but find them to be more newspaper’ish than wedding magazine’ish, but the newspaperstyle emphasizes the fact that, in contratrary to many web 2.0 sites, we actually DO have a lot of great articles, written by real journalists and not just usergenerated content. It is, though, important to stress, that we ARE a magazine and not a newspaper. We like the core font of the site to be Gilles, but if you have a better idea, we’d really like to see it. We like short, big headlines and less amount of text, like http://www.politiken.dk

We want to follow the 960grid / http://960.gs for the layout.

Until now, we’ve just been writing the sitename “Bryllup.dk” with a calligraphic font. If you have an idea for a better “bryllup.dk” or a small logo / icon instead, we’re very happy to see it. We want to use it in all content also, to keep our brand on all articles that are printet out / emailed also.

We need mockups to illustrate your ideas for these parts:

Social part: http://bryllup.dk/ (which is the existing frontpage)
Articles: http://www.bryllup.dk/index.php?opt…mid=100693 (which will be the new frontpage)
Shopping guide: http://www.bryllup.dk/index.php?opt…mid=100695
Forum: http://www.bryllup.dk/index.php?opt…mid=100190
WeddingTools: http://www.bryllup.dk/min-bryllupshuskeliste/ (you need to create a free account to login and see this part)
Imagegalleries: http://www.bryllup.dk/index.php?opt…mid=100720
Downloadsection: http://www.bryllup.dk/download.html

We use a 930x180 topbanner. We also show 5 160x160 pixel banners below the menu right now. Perhaps the 5 small banners could be shown in the right panel instead like http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/

We like the double menuline of sites like http://www.politiken.dk where line 1 is overall site navigation (front page, articles, forum etc.) and line 2 is the article categories (brides, grooms, wedding guests etc.)