Hi, Thanks for the invitation . I would like to work on this project , but only if you make the project payment guaranteed .
Thanks .

Hi Da Miracle, thanks for your feedback. I am 100% committed to choosing a website/design, but I need to be sure that my money is well spent in this forum. Since I''ve never met any of the designers and we all live in different countries there is an element of trust required beyond if I were to find a local designer here in the U.S. I will guarantee payment when I have at least a rough concept of something I''m confident will work for me. I understand if this doesn''t work for you. Thanks you! :) Shelah

Hello,
I just want to say that I understand designing a website for someone in a contest without guaranteed payment poses some challenges on the end of the designer. I understand this perspective. Nobody should work for free and a website is much more time consuming than say designing a logo or book cover.

I would actually like to pull my project from this site and go through different avenues to find a designer (because I'm not sure this process is fair to designers). However, designcrowd won't allow me to do that until the project duration is complete.

Here's what I'm thinking. If a designer submits an initial design concept that I'm confident can be tweaked to my ultimate liking, I will let the entire community/contest know that I have chosen to work exclusively with that designer to avoid everyone wasting their time for 10 days. In addition to providing more security to the designer who will invest more time in the project, at the time I choose a designer to work exclusively with me on the project, I will guarantee payment as well (of course).

I know this isn't the way this contest is supposed to work, but I'm trying to make this more fair to everyone involved. Thanks! :) Shelah

Dear Contest Holder!

I'm in.. i will submit my best level

Thanks

Hi Shelah
its a nice project and i really appreciate your your thoughts about the designers. well i just want to know that you require a design only? or you require a finalize design with wordpress implementation?

please let me know.

regards

Hello! I understand that this is a design contest (does not necessarily include coding), but I would definitely put priority over designs that were functional. Thank you!

Thank you for the invite. I will put some work together for you. I hope you find something you love and the memoir sells well for you!

Hello!  So I thought it might be helpful to direct you to a few author websites that have a general "feel" to them that I like. I really like the layout of khaledhosseini.com and suemonkkidd.com for the same reasons. The banner boldly displays the author name (although I would like my banner to have my name in more scripted/feminine font). I''m obviously not a best-selling author since this is my first book, but it might work well to say "The official website of author Shelah L. Maul" in the banner.

As for the flash, I don''t need it to be flash (don''t have a lot of content to flip through at this point). I''m going to show my web design ignorance, but if it''s possible to have flash that doesn''t change scenes, I like the feel of having the book displayed prominently with a background image behind that is kind of pretty.



I also like the layout of having my picture at the bottom talking up about 25% of the screen as opposed to being the main focal point. Maybe in one bottom corner could be my picture/author bio, and then in the other bottom corner, a place where I can put content about my next title and a link that opens up to a submission form.

A website that I think does a nice job balancing the use of color and negative (white) space is www.rebeccaskloot.com. It has a bright colorful feeling, but the colors are more accents as opposed to taking over the site.

Also, you don''t need to use all the colors I selected from the palette or even those ones specifically. They were selected just as a direction to go w/ colors I like.

Thank you so much for your time and willingness to work on this project! Shelah

The first two websites (layout examples) were www.khaledhosseini.com and www.suemonkkidd.com Thanks!

Hello designers, As I mentioned earlier, I decided to work with just one designer once I was confident it was a good match. I''ve decided to just work with Amy since I am confident in her abilities to customize a website to my needs. While I''m confident many designers who have committed to designing a website are competent, I don''t want to waste everyone''s time making the design perfect to my needs and then not be used. Thanks so much for understanding! :)

Shelah