Website Design for Children\'s Book Series

We are looking for website design that will be engaging for both children and adults. It will be for the first book in a series of children's books, but the site should also appeal to adult women, the mothers of the children. The series of books concerns vintage children's dolls and will feature beautiful illustrations. We would like to be able to manage the content as needed, so part of the project will be to provide us with a content management system so that we can add/revise pages as needed. We envision the following pages: 1. The home page. We would like this to be a full page graphic based on a map that we will provide you (a work in progress version in black and white is attached – a full-color version will be coming later), with rollovers that either change color or reveal a character, display a message and perhaps play a brief sound, and clicking the link will take the viewer to the relevant page within the website. 2. The book contents page. We would like this page to present in a graphically engaging way a list of chapters in the book. We anticipate approximately 32 chapters. We will be releasing the chapters one at a time, most likely one each week. We would like the links for the already released chapters to take the user to a page that we would upload that would consist of a flipbook that we would create. We would like the next chapter to be released to have a running countdown of the number of days, hours, and minutes until the new chapter is released. The rest of the unreleased chapters would have a message next to them: Coming soon. 3. The blog link. This link on the home page would link to our blog, which we manage via Wordpress (we have already created this). 4. The store. This link on the home page would take us to our shopping cart. Initially, this page would feature a "coming soon" message. We have not yet decided on a shopping cart system. 5. About. This link would take us to an inviting looking page that you would create where we would we would be able to post a message and edit it as needed. There will be other links on the home page that we will want to add later. For us, it is important that the website be as eye-catching and as first rate as possible within or near our budget. We would be interested in seeing links to any websites that you have created that might have some elements in common with what we've described above. Or if you want to share with us something using the attached graphic as a mockup, you are welcome to do so, but it is not required (please keep in mind that this illustration is a work in progress and that the final version will be in full color. We've tried to find some sites as reference, and here are a few that might be helpful: [login to view URL]!/page_splash - We like the cleanness, simplicity and friendliness, although this site appears to be geared to a younger audience than we are aiming for (remember, we want to appeal to young girls of 8-12 and their mothers). [login to view URL] - Another friendly looking site, although too young and boyish. While the menu items aren't fully integrated into the graphic, we like how they at least aren't off the graphic or along a bar across the bottom or top. [login to view URL] - This might be our favorite example. We like how things happen when you mouse over. We may not need an element to be moving all the time, like the guy in the middle of the picture, but we like the functionality otherwise and how the links are integrated into the graphic. [login to view URL] - We suspect this is out of our budget, and our artwork would have to be revised to make this approach work, but we thought we'd put this out there in case anybody had some thoughts on how it could be done within or near our budget. So that's it for now. Show us what you've got. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.