Simple, friendly design for web hosting site

Iris Couch

Web server and database hosting, used by web and mobile app developers

http://couchone.jhs.couchone.com/

http://couchone.jhs.couchone.com/get -- This is a backup of the old company page. Customers liked it and I hope they feel familiar and comfortable on the new site. The form I described is here. Notice that many pages follow the theme of **very simple graphic or text above the fold** then details below.

http://www.couchbase.com/ -- Note the logo is just a font, the "big welcome graphic", the clean, clear text.

http://vowsjs.org/ -- This an open source project, not a company. However they have the "big fat graphic" (although it is actually an introduction), with the real content almost below the fold.

http://http://heroku.com/ -- Another site that uses a clever color palette with simple layout to be both pretty and useful.

http://twitter.com/ -- Besides the scripting, the layout is pretty simple and usable, with good colors.

http://http://www.rsync.net/ -- The design is old, maybe too simple, too plain. However it loads fast and it respects users by having a clean, clear layout.

1) Landing page. There is a small amount of text content explaining the site. A large, pleasant graphic is there, similar to some of the example sites. This reminds users that we are from the same web development community as many of those sites. The logo is there, with slogan line "Cloud CouchDB".

A menu (either header or sidebar, whatever looks good) links to other pages. For now, there are 4 links: Service, FAQ, Support, Company. But it would be helpful if the design had room for one or two more for the future. See the comparison websites, many have this format.

The footer has four link columns: Company (which has links "About", "Contact"), News (with links "Blog", "Twitter"), Legal ("Terms of Service", "Privacy Policy", Code ("CouchApp.org", "GitHub"). Finally there is a copyright notice, 2011 Iris Couch.

2. Content page. All pages besides the landing page use this format. It keeps the same theme, but there is more space for content. The same menu is available, perhaps with a different layout. The same footer is present too, again optionally modified if necessary.

In this page, please show this form, looking as friendly as possible. (You can change the label positions if you have a suggestion.)

Sign Up
======
First Name: ____________
Last Name: ____________
Email: ___________
Subdomain: _________ .iriscouch.com
[Send]

Email and Subdomain are required. All my users are web developers, so just a red * is fine, or whatever you recommend.

In the Sign Up form, users request the domain they want. I will use AJAX to check whether it is available or not. Therefore, I need some status information:

* Checking (maybe a spinner icon? maybe gray color?) -- the browser is checking via AJAX whether the domain is available.
* Available (maybe a check mark? maybe green?) -- the domain is available, the user knows to press Send
* Not available (maybe an x? maybe red?) -- the domain is not available and the user knows to try something else

Also please show an example of the following:
* H1, H2
* Body text
* Visited links
* Links with mouse hover
* Un-visited links
* Bullet list

The primary theme is **clean and simple**. We cater to advanced web developers who use the web all day. They like clean web sites that load fast, with clear content. All pages are simple and clean. As with the the example sites or a good iPhone app, the site should immediately feel like it respects your time by being pretty and easy to understand. The site should be fast to load. Therefore, the clean design should be easy to implement in HTML and CSS. The logo is simply "Iris Couch" rendered in a nice font.

Since the name is "Iris", an iris theme might be good. "Iris" has three meanings: (1) The flower, (2) The color #5A4FCF, (3) the colored part of an eyeball. Feel free to use any definition, or to ignore them completely if you don't like to design with purple, or eyeballs.