www.videvo.net needs a new website design

http://www.videvo.net

Videvo offers completely free stock footage and motion graphics for any project.

http://www.videvo.net

Overall we are happy to be led on the style but we have recently had a mini re-brand which you can see on our twitter and facebook profiles. http://www.twitter.com/videvo. We like this blue, and we think it would go well with a dark grey, but if you have a colour palette which you think would work better we'd be open to new ideas. We want to keep the site fun but not childish, with clean lines and graphics. Please use the guidelines above, but please don't be afraid to bring new ideas to the table - I don't want to micro-manage so I'm happy to trust your expertise. I designed the site originally so you can tell I'm not a designer.
I'm happy also to consider light or dark themes if you think one would work best over the other. Overall the site needs to be consistent with stylish graphics and font(s).

The homepage:

The homepage needs the most attention. The main problem at the moment is that it doesn't communicate what we offer, so it needs to be obvious with a header, and/or featured text. It needs a magazine style design (full width without the sidebar) with a short paragraph about who we are and what we do (mainly for SEO purposes), a slider/video area with customisable content, featured clips (the current thumbnail sizes will be fine), recently uploaded clips maybe? Recent blog posts with featured images, a social media section - only needs to be small but perhaps a twitter feed would be useful. Additional call to actions at the bottom of the page, such as links to the other main pages i.e. free video footage, free motion graphics etc. We currently monetize the site though advertising and affiliate links to Shutterstock, so please bear this in mind when it comes to design. The google image ads currently on the site will need to stay, so the top banner, and the two rectangle ads in their current positions.
A header and footer for the homepage should be included, and this will server as the header and footer for the rest of the site. A great example of what we'd like to emulate is http://www.pond5.com, not necessarily full width floating content but the main content area on the homepage is great.

Video Listings page:

This is where all the thumbnails currently reside on the site. We are happy with the thumbnails and the pop up window for each so please keep that (although it can probably be refined), but everything else needs to be changed to be generally more attractive. The sidebar with the list of categories can stay, but more features need to be added; links to other pages, social media links etc. Header and footer same as homepage. We also need a prominent search feature somewhere on this page, either in the sidebar or nested in the top. Google ad positions need to stay where they are. The pagination at the bottom of the page needs to be replaced with something more stylish and user friendly - could benefit with a skip to page field option?

Video Download page:

This is where users currently download clips from. Again it's pretty ugly - we like the layout it's just design is poor. The video player needs a skin (it's an ffmpeg based player I believe), and the layout of the surrounding information needs cleaning up. The download clip steps need cleaning up too.
Below the main download area is a similar clips section, which we need to keep also - these are the affiliate links to Shutterstock. The sidebar also needs to stay, and should include the same features as the video listings page, which should save some time.

Blog Page:

This is currently the worst page on the site! The main blog page needs to feature a list of the most recent posts, and when someone clicks on a post, they are directed to the blog post page. For now, we will just need the blog's top level page, with the list of latest blogs. We imagine this to be separate boxes with a featured image, but we are happy to be led on this. This page should also have the same sidebar as above. Please feel free to add additional bells and whistles as our ideas on this are currently pretty under-developed.

Please don't remove the advertising space currently on the site.

The example image, this is just a rough mock up of the kind of direction we'd like to head in, but there's still a lot I don't like about it. This page is for the video listings page (browse page).