website design for Metacloud

Metacloud

Metacloud is a stealth VC funded startup that provides managed private cloud. Our open standards based virtualization + cloud orchestration software overlays on a customers existing hardware, we provide all the support to manage your private cloud (hardware, virtualization, cloud orchestration layers), further more we provide an easy to understand and use self service web based dashboard that allows customers to easily deploy and manage new virtual machines on their hardware, with whatever flavor of OS they choose. Fully managed private cloud... it's your hardware, your data, your cloud.

http://www.metacloud.com

We want a slight/essence of Asian influence on our website, long story, but that is where we would like to build our overall theme form. Below are sites ranked based on how much wel like them... the first website being the most "liked".

http://www.heroku.com
http://www.joyent.com
http://www.openstack.com

Most notable is heroku.com, as you can see it uses darker backgrounds, but in the dev center page, it uses a lighter background, again we are undecided, but I think a lighter background is the way to go. Also, if you take notice, there is lots of asian influence on heroku.com, with the origami on the main page, and the subtle asian themed wallpaper on the various backgrounds. Please consider those ideas in your design.

***updated brief 11/12/11 -- One thing that seems to be lacking from many of your great designs, is a slight Asian influence. Could I kindly ask that you designers please consider some type of slight asian design influence in your future submissions? If you look at heroku.com, you can see many great, yet very slight Asian influences in their designs. We love that.

Please note, this is not the actual content that will go on the website, but simple additional details and descriptions of what the products are, as well as some additional details for the main page. The actual content will be dropped in after the site is built and sitting on top of our django CMS. ***

<> Main page: I have attached a diagram of what i was thinking, please consider that, but also we are looking for direction for something unique. We really love the look and feel of Heroku.com, but would prefer to use lighter colors as that would work better for our logo. We want the advertisement panels to display different information about our products and our support team. This page will need to have a main advertisement panel with clickable buttons that allow the main product advertisement panel to slide to the corresponding advertisement. Many websites have this, heroku.com for example has origami buttons that when clicked change the advertisement panel to the appropriate advertisement. For example, these advertisement panels will show examples of how a potential customer might consume our "managed private cloud" product, or our marketplace product, or an introduction to specific team members who might be supporting them. We want to emphasize our support staff, fantastic support is key to our success.

Our products are all built from two base open source components, KVM Hypervisor and OpenStack cloud orchestration software.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/

http://www.openstack.com

OpenStack is the most promenant piece of Metacloud's solutions and software. This open source project consist of many services that make cloud computing possible. I have uploaded a .zip file that contains graphics we have built in house that represents the four main components of OpenStack. Those are Nova Compute (the service that manages virtual compute), Nova Network (the virtual networking component), Nova Volume (the block data storage component), and Swift (the object storage component... similar to amazon S3 if you are familiar with that).

<> Product page(s): we have three products today, we'll have more in the future. We want to be able to inform and get potential customers excited about what we have to offer. Again, look at heroku.com, they do a great job of using infographics to show potential customers of how things work. If you see heroku.com/pricing you will notice they have some very awesome "sliders" that allow you to undertand the pricing model, we would like to potentially have something similar.

Our three products are as follows:

Managed Private Cloud: This product is for companies who want their own private cloud, but don't have the expertise on staff to build and maintain a private compute cloud. Our staff at Metacloud will build, monitor and maintain a private cloud for our customers, providing 24/7 support and constantly monitoring all systems and services to provide a reliable computing platform.

Ignition: Ignition is our own forked version of KVM and Openstack, packaged together as a complete solution. This package includes significant updates, patches and improvements over the standard open source versions. The goal is to offer Ignition as a solution to large customers who have in house talent to build and maintain a private cloud, but want the most solid/stable version of KVM & Openstack + our improvements and additions to the UI dashboard that we have made.

Marketplace: Our marketplace is a product that won't be available until Q3 of 2012. The marketplace is somewhat stealth still, so I don't have much detail to provide here, except that it does exist, and will be made public in 2012.

<> Team page: This page needs to showcase the team that will be supporting the various managed private clouds that we deploy with our customers. I want people to feel like they know who the team is, what they do on the customers behalf and how to easily get in touch with our suppor team, service is KEY to our business and success. The point of this page is to show a large centered planel with a picture of one or several (rotating between the different pictures/descriptions) of our support staff, describe what their role is in the company, etc.

Below this main panel, we will have a full roster of the team, their roles, bio, etc.

<> Customer Portal: Paying customers will have access to our portal, that will give them access to documentation, billing/usage, support contact information, system status, etc. If you go here: https://api.heroku.com you will see the entrance page for customers of heroku. We like this idea, but it's far too dark and we prefer a more Korean styled asian theme. There is a very famous "Gateway" in Seoul called Namdaemun You can see a picture here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped…_night.JPG

I would like for that gateway, or something that represents it, to be the gateway to our portal. Looking for creativity here for sure.

<> Blog: We want a layout here that is simple, clean and professional, but is tied back to the overall theme of the website.

This site will run on top of django-cms. Our customer base ranges from very large corporations that sell non technology related products (healthcare, insurance, post production, etc) to small-medium sized technology companies that don't have in house talent required to manage a private cloud.