Redesign website for educational publisher

Mentoring Minds - "Critical Thinking for Children!"

Mentoring Minds is an educational publisher focused on creating a successful learning environment for children.

Our philosophy: We consider ourselves partners with educators in the continuous pursuit of providing a quality education for all students. As educators dedicated to excellence, it is our privilege to provide valuable teaching tools that are needed to empower teachers and to positively impact the lives of children.

A person that educates, especially a teacher, principal, or other person involved in planning or directing education. Mentoring Minds to-date has been primarily focused on elementary schools and reaching principals; however MM touches a broad range of school types, including: Public, Title One, Charter, and Private/Christian/Catholic. The majority of educators tend to be female with bachelors degree or higher and emotionally attached and passionate about the future success of children.

To be more precise, our audience consists of, but is not limited to, persons who hold the title of district administrator, principal, assistant principal, teacher, curriculum instructor/director, or grade leader.

Mentoring Minds is looking for a graphical face lift of the current website. We are looking for something that is clean, easy-to-read, and easy to navigate. We are known for the use of purple, so that color needs to be leveraged in the new site. The core design for this project will revolve around the homepage, but the header will be used on subsequent pages, such as product pages, as well.

As previously mentioned, the back-end of the site is being reworked, so new buttons and topics will be implemented. Some of the new changes that can be integrated into the design:

Open-ended search function
Account Login
Buttons across the top consisting of: Products, Research, About Us, Contact, Home, FAQ
An area to sign up for newsletters
Implementation of flash
An area for static images dedicated to special offers
Integration of photos of educators and kids

A site layout we liked is http://www.lululemon.com
Our website can be found at http://www.mentoringminds.com.

Our overall desire is to have a “refresh” of the look of our site. We want a professional, yet inviting look, but keeping children at the core of our look. In other words, some color, but not overbearing.

Here is our logo in .eps:
http://www.mentoringminds.com/John/MMlogo.zip

The design files will need to be vector files (unless it is not feasible) that are compatible with Photoshop or Illustrator.