What’s Cooking America is aiming to redesign their website. Going to 99designs.com, here are the details of the contest:

We’re developing a website for one of the largest cooking sites on the internet, and we want your help! We’re looking for several mockups, intensely professional, minimalist, simple
We are re-designing this website from the ground-up. Some of it’s competitors include myrecipes.com, allrecipes.com, epicurious.com, http://www.recipezaar.com/. These are the competitors that we need to crush
Layout should be liquid, elastic…we’re looking at users with 800×600 and 2300×1900, so flexibility is important. Each PSD mockup should have a home page ‘look’, ‘article page’, recipe page, a ’secondary content’ page, search/results page, open to others if you have thoughts. Please review the website for an idea of the content involved and the site map, etc. When desigining, please keep the current AdSense ads in mind with the design…also note, we have no use for banner ads in the design. We have very well-paying clients, so for the right designer, we can be an extremely profitable client. We do not need help in programming/coding, just the design of the site. To re-emphasize, this site will most likely be one of your most visible portfolio pieces, as this site gets tens of millions of pageviews every year.

Below is a screenshot of their current homepage:

Current Design

1. Logo HAS to go - Although contest specifically stated not to touch it
2. Area has no organization or order, thumbnails are different sizes, article lengths vary from long to short - categorization is absent
3. Seems that this area is just filled with links to other sister wesites, or articles that belong to other websites. Again, shows lack of planning and organization
4. Probably the only section that has some form of class - Summer Drinks. Altough aesthetically - thumbnails are different sizes, table columns span the size of the thumbnail above making them un-uniformed, plus - text are center aligned *I don’t like center aligned text

In addition, the pages are clearly done in with no server technology whatsoever. It has good content - but sure can use a blogging platform such as wordpress. This alone can take care of categorization, visual order, not to mention - search engine optimization… but I digress. I’m here to redesign, that’s what I need to do.
The screenshot below is my first mock up of what the site can look like:

Proposed Design

What I’ve done:

1. The Logo - I did not touch, but did make it very small to NOT to cramp the style
2. Added a giant container for a “feature” recipe or article. The attention grabber, the headliner - can be done with a slideshow or a codaslider effect of some sort. This is the jist of the website, the “thesis” statement … you get my point
3. Formatted all articles to have the same look - the same number of lines, characters, the same continue reading buttons etc. Thumbnail sizes are also identical (like I’ve mentioned - can be done automatically depending on the wordpress theme). Played with Font sizes and colors - titles of course, are larger than the content, category titles are even bigger with added style
4. Added an extended footer - which contains an ever so important “about the author”, also squeezed in the external links to other websites

And that’s it. Hoping the folks running the contest see things the way I see them and hopefully win. I haven’t won a single contest yet - but still trying.