Inspiring webdesign for exclusive B&B portal! Quick feedback!

Pensionen Mit Charme

Pensionen-mit-charme features a handpicked selection of small, charming, highly personal B&Bs (pensionen) and small hotels in Germany. Our selection criteria include:
* Romantic locations, attractive surroundings, landscape, streetscape
* Max 20 rooms
* Attractive houses, either heritage or decorated with personal touch
* Friendly, personal service
Right now the site is German-language only, but soon we shall offer an English language site as well.

Visitors:
Tourists who are looking for a personal, unique holiday in Germany. They are sick of staying in “bed-mountains”! They want to stay somewhere special and until now it has been impossible to find the places they want in the typical mass-portals. They appreciate the selectivity and personal touch of pensionen-mit-charme. Our biggest fans tend to be woman over 30.

Advertisers:
B&B and small hotel owners in Germany who have difficulty standing out from the crowd. They are passionate about their house and know they have something special, but they are finding it difficult to separate themselves from the tens of thousands of other B&Bs in Germany.

Deliverables ( multi-layer .psd format)
* Home page design
* Button design
* Pop-up contact form

Our existing website design can be seen online here:
http://www.pensionen-mit-charme.de/

Things we are happy about include:
* Large images
* Logo
* Simplicity and general approach.

Things we are not happy about include:
* Colors. At first we really liked the colors, then we found that some colors don't look nice on certain screens.
* Single column layout is becoming restrictive
* We would like more design detail which were beyond our CSS implementation skills first time around.
* Important conversions do not stand out.

Sources of inspiration
* http://www.andbeyondafrica.com/ :
Clean design
Brings out the beauty of of images
However, we would like to add a slightly more charming touch by using a small amount of color and design detail

http://www.kampen.de/
Again, clean with great images

Colors
You can see our current colors online at http://www.pensionen-mit-charme.de. We are open to different colors. In particular, we dont like the solid blocks of color. Feel free to experiment.

More design guidance
* Not corporate style
* Not classic hotel-search portal style
* A touch of blog-like charming flair, but dont go overboard
* Avoid large radius rounded corners

More requirements
* 960 pixel wide (Optimize for screens of 1024x768)
* 2 column