Wanted for Hire: (Graphical) Web Site Designer

[richard]

I am looking for someone to produce a new visual design for the LNER Encyclopedia. I will perform the actual conversion, but the designer should supply a series of example pages (3-4: a locomotive page, an index page, etc) and matching CSS style sheet. Although this will involve HTML, it is considered more of a graphic design project.
As well as the sample pages, deliverables include a set of phpBB styles (I can create the style if a list of specific colours are provided), new logo, and ideally a matching "favicon" icon as well.

Fee: GBP200 by Paypal or sterling cheque on delivery and acceptance.
I suspect this is low for a British graphic designer, but this is what the advertising allows. My usual (non-English) site designer would charge a similar amount, but I don't think he has the British railway background to do a good job. I expect this project will appeal to a student graphic designer with an interest in railways (and I could act as a reference on completion); or someone who would like a go in their spare time.

Specifications (I may add more as I think of them)

Visually, the new look should be sympathetic to the liveries, logos, styling, etc of the LNER. It should also be clear and easy to understand.

Multiple 'trial' visual looks are to be encouraged, and I would probably post a poll allowing forum members to decide amongst the most promising.

I will have final say on the technical underpinnings. The site is hosted on FreeBSD running Apache. SSI, PHP, Perl, Python, MySQL, etc are all available. The pages need to:

- Use pure CSS formatting. No tables for page formatting.
[the current site is a mix]
- Fully XHTML compliant. Ideally "Strict XHTML", but "Transitional XHTML" will be allowed for things like Google/Amazon links.
- SSI will be used to split the header, margin and footer from each page. The source code for the page should be arrange to make this easy to perform.
- Pages should have space/ability to add advertising boxes as required - eg. like the current Google AdSense boxes.
- I intend to keep the current hierarchical arrangement. The concept of the side margin 'local' menu should be kept, although I will entertain alternatives. (some are too long to go across the top in my opinion)
- Use of extensive JavaScript is to be discouraged, but small amounts are okay. Any JavaScript must degrade gracefully - ie. the pages must be usable with it switched off.

- Must work with IE 6,7 (IE 5 would be nice as well)
- Must work with Firefox 1,2
- Pages must be printable with all supported browsers.
- The site must be usable in a text browser.

I will start a discussion thread in Suggestion Box for discussion of this request.