Eye Catching Website for Outdoor Lover's Paradise: Haliburton Forest in Ontario/Canada

Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve

Get a great reference for your portfolio by helping us creating a unique and eye catching new website:
An outdoor lover's paradise, Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve Ltd, features wilderness adventure activities including the Wolf Centre, the Walk in the Clouds forest canopy tour, groomed snowmobile trails, mountain biking, dog sledding, fishing, hiking, astronomy, wildlife observation, wilderness camping and accommodations, and an array of educational programs.

Target audience:
- People who like to spend one or more days enjoying some of the tourist activities in the Forest
- Business partners, suppliers, journalists - anybody who wants to find out about the various activities of HF

Website goals:
- Attract new visitors through search engines and referring sites
- Animate website visitors to physically come visit the forest
- Build and improve the Haliburton Forest brand
- Showcase the diversity of activities as well as the unique nature of the HF operation

http://www.haliburtonforest.com

We want creative usage of high impact images, clean button icons and call to action buttons.Create a unique experience for the user to generate the desire to physically visit this place.Design restrictions: Hardly any, use your imagination. 

The only rules & guidelines we like to give:

- Use the existing HF logo, the official logo color is #006400. Use this color - or any nicely matching colors - for your design.

- Width of design should be around 1000 pixel, fixed with

- no boring area outside the content area. We know most users screens are bigger then 1000 pixel. Use background images/graphics to create an eye catching overall design

We don't want to provide a wireframe layout yet, as we like to offer more flexibility to the designers at this stage.

We will use a lot of content from the existing site, but the content will be broken into more pages, and the navigation menu will be re-structured. A preliminary example of the new menu is at the bottom of this description.

Home page content:
- Header with logo, search field and main menu navigation
- rotating image & content slider showing high impact images and a 1 sentence description for selected activities/attractions
- short text summarizing what Haliburton Forest is about (1 or 2 paragraphs - much less then current homepage text)
- Events portlet highlighting one mayor upcoming event (examples: Forest Festival in August, Poker Run snowmobile event in January)
- testimonials - 1 or 2 highly positive testimonials
- Feature story: Selected blog post. 2 or 3 paragraphs, "read more" link
- Button/portlet: Book your Experience Now (this will be a link to a new external booking application, where visitors can book their stay and schedule/pre-pay their activities)
- Social Media portlet to share and connect, similar as the one here http://www.socialmediatips.com/
- image gallery showing thumbnail sized images for various activities
- Footer with footer menu, social sharing links, Newsletter signup

Typical content page describing one or more activities/attractions. Use "Wolf Centre" as example for a content page.
- Header same or similar to homepage
- Breadcrumb navigation
- "Print this page" feature
- footer same as homepage
- content related sub-menu on left side to navigate to related pages. For Wolf Centre, submenu contains:
- Wolf Pack Members
- History
- Wild Wolves
- large area for actual content with in-text images. If possible we like to use only a 2 column layout, with 1 large column for content, and one on the left for navigation and the additional portlets below
- reservations & information: Button or text link with email & phone number
- portlet showing upcoming events related to current content
- portlet showing testimonial related to content
- depending on Activity: Rates, availability time
- optional: Gallery showing images related to content

Main Navigation Menu of new site (draft):

Around the Forest
- Outdoor Education
- Wolf Centre
- Forest Stores
- Woodshop
- Sawmill
- Forest Festival
- Forest Art Project
- Citizen Science

Activities
- Canopy Tour
- Wolf Centre
- Astronomy
- Camping
- Mountain Biking
- Fishing
- Dog Sledding
- Snowmobiling

News & Events
- Event Calendar
- Forest Festival
- Citizen Science
- Trail Conditions

Amenities
- Basecamp & Reception
- Accomodation
- Camping
- Cookhouse Restaurant
- Woodshop
- Rentals

About Us
- History of the Forest
- Contact
- Log Home Kits
- Employment
- Links
- Forest Blog

Getting Here
- Driving Directions
- Forest Maps
- Trail Conditions

- No sterile "corporate style" design
- design shouldn't require Flash for implementation
- Don't use fonts which rely on images only. Any writing should be search engine friendly and fonts will be embedded into the site later.

Images and different versions of the logo to be used in the design (banners, background etc.) are here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/1000…oLr3uOQlQE
All images can be downloaded as a single ZIP file using the function “More > Download Album”.