Facelift Needed for Leading Industry Site

CannabisFN

​CFN Media (the parent company) is an creative agency and online media network dedicated to the worldwide legal cannabis industry. Public and private companies and brands in the cannabis industry hire us to attract specific audiences.

CannabisFN.com is a news/media website where we publish stories and video content covering our clients, as well as general industry topics. This is the site being designed.

We target investors, bankers, consumers/patients (medical, recreational MJ, CBD, hemp)​ and businesses interested in and operating within the cannabis industry.

http://www.cannabisfn.com

- Our current website is almost a decade old, so please don't base the design on it at all. We are looking for something completely new.

- We would like to focus on a rich media experience that's more along the lines of entertainment websites than long-form articles.

- We are open to/would prefer a new color scheme, but would like to stick to green colors for obvious reasons.

- Any photography or illustrations should be focused on either finance or cannabis, although we're trying to deemphasize the "stoner" aspects of the industry, so stick to professionals (e.g. growers, hydroponics, doctors, etc.).

- Website should be edge-to-edge in design and definitely incorporate videos and images in some way.

- We are open to ideas in terms of design, so please don't use the websites below exclusively as design inspiration. Our business goals are to increase pageviews, time on page, and put video front and center to feature our clients.

- Homepage should feature a video player, feature story section, and a display of other stories. It could also have a sidebar somewhere showing the top stories, most popular, etc. It should also have the feature company scroller that's seen on our existing design.

- Single post page (e.g. article page) should have an image spanning the top of the article and a similar sidebar showing related stories and videos. There should also be a section on the sidebar that shows a client video and has a form offer to complete (in the event that the article is covering a client).

No red colors as we are a mainly a financial media based site. Green, blue and orange are good hues and our logo is green colored.

​We are considering a redesign to our CFN Media logo​ to replace the marijuana leaf with another symbol that conveys 'global media' as opposed to something that is blatantly marijuana. We can place a tag line under the CFN Logo "Cannabis Financial & Business Media" to clarify if we move away from MJ leaf.

We would likely keep our current menu structure on CannabisFN along with the footer (i.e. Network Partners), opt-in form, site search field, and iOS app download display, Press Coverage on homepage. We also have a green button "Become a Feature Company" for signing up new clients. We'd need to determine where to place all of these on the new redesigned site.

We have two scrolling thumbnail palettes on the current homepage that display our clients. We need to determine a better way to present this to visitors on the new site.