New What's Fun Online App Needs Polished Design

WhatsFunThisWeek.com

***** Clarified Creative Brief - Please Read ******

Our new online event calendar application is almost finished, but we still need a great design before we launch.

Like a Craig's List for fun, WhatsFunThisWeek.com (WFTW) offers a consolidated online calendar to help people find fun and interesting events (both local and virtual) in a variety of categories. Unlike existing print and online calendars of events that only include editors’ picks or options from a specific category like business or running, WFTW will offer a wide variety of options to accommodate users’ multidimensional interests.

Our target audience is adults in the Washington, DC area who want to find fun, interesting events and people anywhere who want to find fun, interesting webinars and teleseminars.

We’d like to see a homepage design, however the header and sidebar layout of the homepage should work as the framework for the event listing page too. The final deliverable should be a Photoshop or Fireworks editable, layered file.

We're looking for a clean, simple Web 2.0 design with a dash of fun and a pinch of sophistication. It should blend well with our unique logo and conform to our official color palette.

The feelings we'd like to evoke from people who come to the site are: Quality, integrity, easy-to-use, a cornucopia of fun, can’t wait to share this with others

About 85% of the basic element positioning is already in place, but the rough mockup we've been using during our development phase is really, really ugly. We need a sleek, inviting design upgrade that's worthy of our developers' hard work on the back end functionality. We're mostly satisfied with the positioning of the major page elements, but are open to UI improvement suggestions if you have any.

Resources Available (relevant files attached):
Our logo
Our colors
Mockups of various page layouts
You can take a look at the live test site here: http://whatsfunthisweek.com/events

Here are some sites we think are cool and whose designs we like:

http://letsfreckle.com/
http://www.mint.com
http://www.aesthera.com
http://www.aggregateknowledge.com/
http://www.arcsight.com/
http://www.silecs.com/
http://www.zettacore.com/
http://www.rescuetime.com