New site design for digital security software company

Digital Defence: http://digitaldefence.com

Digital Defence is a security software company of highly experienced data security developers and software architects with a unique data encryption software offering that protects software that is in mobile transit (laptops, removable media, memory sticks, etc.).

We offer a top quality service and one of the things that distinguishes our product from our competitors is our ability to offer whitelisting of accessible applications. What this means is that the security software can be used to allow access to company databases but restrict access to certain websites, for example.

Our software is used internationally by public and private organisations such as the UK police force and we're currently talking to a number of international brands about possible large wholesale requirements for our technology and products.

So our site really needs to reflect a strong corporate image that portrays a modern, dynamic, flexible company whose products and services are on the cutting edge in their field.

Our customers are likely to be driven to the site from a strong search engine marketing and social media campaign as well as offline marketing and PR.

Our products are distributed through companies like Motorola and their distributors and resellers. The site needs to address this audience as well as IT professionals (manager and director level) of large organisations who would be looking for a security solution to roll out and, conversely, consumers who are looking to buy the product in smaller quantities.

The current site is built using the Drupal open source CMS framework (drupal.org) and the design needs to be created as specifically for this CMS as possible.

The design needs to be flexible enough for us to apply to different types of pages or content that will be appearing on the site (e.g., blogs, articles, videos, and static pages like contact pages, case studies, etc.).

The design needs to be fixed width, clean and simple and ideally around the 960px range.

Please keep graphical devices to a sensible level.

For any graphical backgrounds that you employ in your design, please be aware that with the Drupal CMS, content and block columns don't always stay the same width or height (e.g. with different font sizes), so please ensure that your design provides extra area for background images to allow for that variability.

Please use browser generated, "web-safe" fonts in the main content areas of the site and for buttons, menu links or section headings.

Finally, we're looking overall for a design that is graceful in all situations and in most modern browsers (IE, FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Safari), so please don't push the envelope too much

We will need the final design supplied as a layered RGB file. We would prefer that in PNG format for Fireworks but will accept a PhotoShop PSD file. Please give all the layers you use meaningful names and remove any unnecessary layers.

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Please create a new home page design but take into account that this is a social-media enabled Drupal website and will be subject to the information described above. The design should therefore include the following:

- Show how H1, H2, H3, H4 headings should be handled in the page body.
- Show how form elements (fields, buttons, etc.) will be handled.
- Show how lists of content (such as a list of teaser blog posts) will be handled.
- Provide basic buttons that suit the theme for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. These will be used for "follow us" buttons.
- Provide support and detailed theming for both horizontal and vertical menus as a combination of these will be used throughout the site in various places.
- Provide room for a detailed footer (see comments in Example Websites about motorola.com and intermec.com) including links to RSS feeds.
- More content will be added to the site such as case studies, press releases and news and these need to be easily distinguishable from each other and the rest of the content on the site.

Although we do not expect the final site will be 100% compliant with the W3C standards, please avoid design elements that can't easily be implemented in accordance with those standards (e.g. Silverlight, iFrames, Flash) as we need the site to be robust in situations such as being viewed on mobile devices and screen readers.

The existing site is at http://digital-defence.com

A good example of a competitor whose website reflects the kind of image we wish to portray is http://www.credant.com although they seem to be trying to show too much information and it's a little overwhelming on the home page.

Other competitor sites that you might wish to look at for inspiration are http://becrypt.com and http://www.checkpoint.com/pointsec.

We like the motorola.com site and the visual split that they use on the home page between consumers and business could be used similarly for our different target audiences.

We also intermec.com and the way that they've organised information in the footer; it's nice and clean and easy to see what you're looking for.