New website design wanted for The Vintage Cup

Home Furnishing

The Vintage Cup will be an ecommerce site selling vintage tea sets and accessories - tea cup duos and trios, cake stands etc. The audience will be predominantly female, 25+. They may or may not be avid vintage tea set collectors. Mostly I will be aiming to appeal to people who have an appreciation for sharing the experience of having a nice cup of tea with friends, and like nice, vintage, quirky homewares. The shabby-chic inspired home design style is popular with this type of product.

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I would like this site to have a clean, feminine feel that is welcoming, fresh and invites the visitor to browse and stay on the site. It would be great if it conveyed a vintage-lifestyle feel whilst being contemporary in web design elements. Something simple that will not date too quickly. I love clean space on websites. It is important that the product is the hero on this site so any background wallpapers used should be soft and subtle and not overpower or detract from the product shots. Vintage tea sets have quite intricate and colourful designs so the site design should keep this in mind - nothing too busy. I do not like boundaries and borders and boxes. I am happy with sections being defined by colour if need be. I have not settled on a colour palette though like soft browns, pinks, blues, green and creams. See note below on logo. Here are a couple of background vintage wallpaper vectors that I like the look/feel of. These could be contrasted with a stripe if an alternative is needed - ie see vintagesimplicity website example. You may decide to take a simpler approach. That is fine. Examples: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-il…st=c5742d9 http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-il…st=c5742d9

I'd like this design contest to focus on the overall look and feel and visual design elements of the site. I am working with a company to build the site and already have a template selected. I have attached the initial mock up of the site that I have received from them - for the homepage and for a product category page. This contest should focus on design of the homepage following the template. What I'm looking for specifically is background selection, design treatment of left nav bar, product boxes etc.

you will see the template mock ups include rounded box borders - this and anything that looks old-school web design should avoided. It makes me feel closed in and not what I want for the site. Action buttons should be clear without being over the top and intrusive. Large, dark blocks of colour should be avoided. Please do not use yellow, red, orange, purple or strong colour tones.

The logo I have supplied is in brown - however I am open to changing the colour of the logo and want it to fit in with the colour palette of the site. Totally flexible on this. i have uploaded a couple of tea set pics so you can see what types of things I will be selling. Ignore the black backgrounds - ideally product shots will be clear cut or on white.

Every design category has flexible pricing for all budgets. Web page design starts at $819.