Designing the best website in river-cruising

Chervona Ruta Cruise Company

We are a cruise company that offers river and sea cruises in Ukraine. Our website was initially designed to be of a descriptive nature informing our stakeholders of our business. We decided that it’s time to update the design and technical capabilities of our website to make it more attractive, functional and effective. We want to use our website for ecommerce purpose as well as informative, selling our cruises online. Our primary target audience are the people in their 50th-60th that are looking for a way to spend their vacation; and the travel agencies/tour operators that are looking for new partners in developing markets like Ukraine. Our secondary target audience are the people in their 30th - 40th that are looking for a location to spend their holiday and the organizations that are looking to rent a ship for a corporate event.

http://www.ruta-cruise.com

I do not want to restrain the imagination of the talented designers, so please go ahead and present your ideas. However, I want to stress that four criteria are critical:
1. Design should be aesthetically pleasing signaling upscale/premium standard of service.
2. The design should be focus on RIVER and to some extend sea (not ocean) cruise theme. The images/graphics/animation should be associated with river cruises.
3. The website design should be simple and intuitive, but at the same time sophisticated.
4. The design should incorporate the new trends and developments on website design market. For example, clickable graphical options, etc.

I do not have any strict guidelined on the selection of colors, however, I would recommend using blue color as a base color to underline the maritime theme.

The required website design should carry two functions. Firstly, it should outline the design of the home page of the website. Secondly, its background should become a template/master page for all the other pages of the website. I ask you to develop and interesting and original pattern that can be implemented on all the pages of the website. The design should project an upscale premium image of services that we offer on our river and sea cruises. The page should be in the marine theme, projecting high quality premium standards of service. The page should give a graphic representation for such clickable options as Cruises, Meet Ukraine, Why Chervona Ruta, Our Fleet, Limited-Time Deals, Brochures, Life Onboard, Contact Us. The images for the graphic clicable options can be selected by the designer at free will.

The design should be attractive and premium, but at the same time quite discreet and appealing to the older population. The design should not use some fancy software that loads more than 5 seconds and requires a user to download plugins, etc.

We are updating our logo now, but please use the one I uploaded as a guide.