New blog design for "How To Payroll" blog

How To Payroll

We post general, basic how-to payroll information for people who run payroll. The majority of our audience is new, first-time payroll runners.

http://www.howtopayroll.com

This website will be a Wordpress blog, and thus the three pages needed are: Homepage, Individual post page, and Category page. The sidebar will be consistent on all pages.

Sidebar: I would like a form at the top, similar to howtopayroll.com, but not intruding on the top banner. The form fields should be Name, Email, Phone, # of Employees and Payroll Frequency (dropdown). Underneath the form I would like a "Related Posts" segment, which will dynamically pull the 5 most recent posts. Underneath that I would like a Tag Cloud segment, which draws in the most popular tags, and makes the more popular tags larger in font size. This Tag Cloud segment should only appear on the homepage.

Homepage: The homepage should have a banner at the very top that uses "How To Payroll" as the H1 tag. Underneath the banner I would like the (horizontal) navigation menu, which is the homepage ("Home"), blog categories (for now you can use "Category One," "Category Two," etc.) and "About Us." Underneath the navigation menu is where the blog post will be.
This homepage will be different from typical blog homepage's in that it will just be one full blog post. Please use the exact copy that's currently on howtopayroll.com. Treat "Payroll 101" title as an H2. The rest of the copy should flow underneath.

Footer: The footer is global across all pages. It should just be a horizontal list of the navigation menu, separated by pipes, ("|"). Make the font size smaller than the copy from the "Payroll 101" post.

Individual post page: The individual post page should have the same header, footer and sidebar (no tag cloud) as the Homepage. In the main content section, the post title should be an H1 at the top. Underneath the title, list out the date, author and category. Underneath that I would like the Google+, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social share icons. Below this should be the post copy. At the end of the post copy, I would like the tags listed.
Reference this post page as an example: http://www.zillow.com/blog/2012-09-…pen-house/

Category page: The category page should have the same header, footer and sidebar (no tag cloud) as the Homepage. I envision the category title at the top. Below the title is a list of each post that fits in the category. I would like to use the post title and a short excerpt from the post. A thumbnail image should float left. The same social icons from the post page should float right. A maximum of 10 posts per page.
Reference this category page as an example:
http://mashable.com/social-media/

I will mention this a couple times in this description, but I do not like the "boxed" look the header, post, sidebar, footer are all separated by borders/lines. I would like more open space.