As a long-time reader and appreciator of LetsRun.com, I approached this re-design with a healthy amount of skepticism, but I decided to send in this proposal anyway with hope that your own feelings about the “brand” of LetsRun are similar to mine.

A website redesign is always some kind of re-branding. With an already successful website, it can be a little nerve-wracking. That being said, I think that the brand of LetsRun is not the “lack of design”, but rather the density of information. The Drudge Report and LetsRun work so well because a large amount of information can actually be kind of nice to look at and peruse through, even though it violates traditional website organization.

This being said, I’ve structured this re-design around the following goals:
• retain the density of information, but trade chaos for richness
• update, (not abolish) the color scheme
• clarify the typography so that information is easier to navigate 

The guy that wrote that almost won the contest right there as his description was perfect. The whole process made us realize that we really like our site.  In reality, we don’t want to rebrand letsrun.com too much. We just want to clean it up, organize it, make it more professional.

Anyway, enough theory and on to specifics. We received a ton of good ideas but none that was a winner. We did pick 5 "Studly Designs" which we thought taught us a lot about what we want in a site (even if they honestly weren't the best designs - they taught us the most). Instead of awarding one of them $1,000, we decided to award all five of them $300 each if they are willing to let us share their designs with you. 

We're now going to give the community our feedback on some of the entries and re-open the contest. We've upped the prize to $2,000 and we've opened it up to people outside the LetsRun.com community by posting the contest on 99designs.com. At that site, we will be providing feedback on the new designs as we receive them.

The 2nd and final round of the contest will last one week. We will pick one winner at that point.

Based on your submissions, we're pretty sure we like the following:

• The quote of the day is very important to the site and needs to be very prominently displayed.
• The site must include two ad units above the fold: (this is a change from the 1st contest) space for a 300 x 250 ad/video player as well as 720 x 90 ad. Occasionally, we have another video player on the site.
• The quote of the day is very important to the site and needs to be very prominently displayed.
• Based on our previous contest on our own site, we're pretty sure we like the following:
• Almost certainly 3 columns - our idea is to get rid of the column on the left and put in a horizontal nav bar but you are free to do what you want. (we don't care if you don't know what topics should be in the nav bar - we're looking for design).
• Please note: At least two of the columns must be for news.  It's important for people to realize that we post 12-15 new news item per day. That is what the site is all about.  
• The key is clean, simple lines between the columns with space between the lines and the text.
• We don't think we want to underline the hyperlinks.  
• A cleaner font.

Below you will find the designs that most inspired us with our comments about what we liked and didn't. If you take the criticisms below and add them to what we just wrote, you might just win the contest.

To enter the contest, you have to go to 99designs.com. PLEASE READ THE CRITERIA OUTLINED THERE.

Please note that if you click on the images they will enlarge on a separate window.