Homepage for MMA News Site Wanted!

MMA Chronicles (http://www.mmachronicles.com)

MMAChronicles.com is a site which aggregates news stories and articles from all of the most popular MMA blogs and news sites, giving it's users a one-stop shop to find the most current and interesting news related to the sport of mixed-martial-arts.

We currently still have the first version of the site (located at http://www.mmachronicles.com) in production. It's based off of a Drupal install. We've since re-built it entirely from the ground up and we're looking for a theme and brand to take it to the next level! The unstylized prototype is located http://project-veronica.appspot.com. This is your clean slate!

We are looking to cater to young adults, particularly sports enthusiasts and martial-arts enthusiasts of any gender!

IMPORTANT: We want to emphasize the more professional side of MMA, as a legitimate sport, as opposed to brutal cage-fighting that is often depicted by the media or even other MMA websites. We would like to see something a little more sleek and classy than your typical fight page (i.e. no blood spatters, no gladiators, etc).

We want a very clean and functional homepage.

Required Elements:

1) Header and footer.
We don't have a logo, so anything you can do with the text, even a stylized font, for the header would be great. The footer should just be a standard footer with links for endpoints like "About", "Contact", etc, followed by a copyright line.

2) Story block <- main content
Main content will be delivered from the homepage in a Digg-style list of "story blocks" (for an example of what this looks like, take a look at the stories on Digg.com). Would like this to be simple, but informative. Fields and text that will be available for display will be...
-title
-teaser (200 - 300 characters long)
-thumbnail (optional, depending on story)
-source feed
-source feed favicon
-author
-published date
-updated date

*see attached file for sample sketches for a story block (I'm no artist, so your version doesn't have to match this. I'm just including this as an example. The same goes for the layout sketches as well).

3) Popular Stories
We would like a "Popular Stories" section in the sidebar, again like Digg's "Top in All Topics" section on Digg.com.

4) Pagination
Simple standard pagination icons located at the bottom of the page.

5) Ad Placement
The main income for this site would be ad-based. I'd like to see as many ads to be placed on the homepage as is tasteful and doesn't clutter the layout or interfere with functionality.