Appleton Area School District wants to redesign their website.  Their web designer puts it up on 99designs for a good layout. According to the design brief:

My client is a school district made up of several schools.  They want to bring the look of the district into one design and force the individual schools to use a template design.  The Apple logo for the Appleton Area School District will need to be on the upper left with the words “Appleton Area School District”

A screenshot of the existing homepage is shown below:

The problems I found with their existing website:

1. Too much blank space. This is due to the fluid layout the designer used for the pages. It is almost impossible to attain uniform looking webpages with fluid layouts due to the compromise in the screen resolution. Personally - I NEVER use fluid layouts.
2. Pages in the right hand menu do not contain enough information to fill an actual page. When you click on links such as “Mission Statement” or “From The Principal” - it takes you to a page with 3 or 4 sentences. Barely enough to fill a container - much less a page.
3. The template disappears as soon as you navigate to other pages - I guess this is why they need a redesign.

Below are screenshots of the inner pages:

As you can see - the pages went from one layout to another. Moreover, many of the information in the inner pages I feel should be presented in their homepage anyway. This should alleviate a lot of the blank space issue they have in their homepage, plus present valuable information right in their most important page - the homepage.

My design: I came up with a fixed layout - 960 pixels that stays in the middle of the page. White background all around, simplified fonts and no effects on pictures and other elements. I wanted to keep the website professional looking as well as modern.

1. A very simple template for the mother school district - which contain nothing more but their logo, search and their main navigation bar. This will house all the other school websites that will act as subsites.
2. All the bits and pieces of information that used to be in other pages - I’ve categorized appropriately in the home page. On the left hand side - a large photo of the school, followed by announcements. This includes the principal’s note and the general school announcements. The middle column are acts as an informative column - basically general information about the school that everyone should know about - this includes their a) mission statement, b) school history - in this case “Janet Lee Berry” and c) contact information. Finally, the right most column are ”calendars and events” stuff. This includes a calendar for their events, the schools’ daily schedule, and finally lunch and program schedules.

A screenshot of my design is shown below. You can view the actual size by clicking on the image. 

Once again, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I have yet to win in 99designs.