Very basic draft completed. Need someone to apply their creative magic

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This customer received 19 web designs from 6 designers. They chose this web design from john as the winning design.
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Web Design Brief
I am building a new website for my business and looking for a designer to assist me on a part-time basis.
My business is a booking site for classes and lessons. It is essentially a directory service, and needs to conform to a standard web-layout that is easy to navigate and familiar to users (i.e. nothing to creative). The function and structure i have adopted is common amongst sites like ebay, hotel booking services, etc.
The first task on my list is to develop the main page. I have already compiled a draft of the first page using Fireworks (see attached) and am looking for someone to cast their creative magic to this draft while maintaining the general layout of the page. After the main page is developed, I will be looking for the same designer to assist with the rest of the site.
Design wise, I'd like to go for a slightly retro feel
By this I mean a moderately modern page with a spark of retro here and there. If you look at my draft you'll notice that I've used regular font for most text, and retro/old-school fonts for surburb names.
I happy for you to suggest colours, but regular page elements such as web links need to remain standard (i.e links = blue) so that they are familiar and identifiable to my users.
Other points:
1) I don't want the page to be too dark (dark headings, images and borders are fine, but I'd like to maintain white or light backgrounds)
2) Positioning: The Body should be centred, with the Header and Footer extending across the hole screen (as illustrated in my draft)
3) I'm happy if the design includes images from photostock libraries.The Silhoute picture for my draft were choosen because there are hundreds of them, and I can regularly change them on the site - keeping it fresh and new. I'd be very happy if the design incorporate images that could also be place often using photo stock images (i.e. happy to keep silhoutes, but leave it to you to decide what looks best)
Note: I'm happy for you to "copy" art work from any photo stock site, and I will pay for the full quality images when the design is selected.
4) The page Footer needs a lot of attention. It will contain standard Footer links/elements.
5) You are free to do anything to the Header section. It needs to have login/register elements
I'm happy to provide further comments, or review other sites/work to help direct design work.
Updates
Hi All,
Added Saturday, December 24, 2011
Project Deadline Extended
Reason: I'm away on holiday and will review your submissions and provide feedback when I get back.
Added Tuesday, January 03, 2012
Industry/Entity Type
Building
Look and feel
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