URGENT - Group Buying Website Web 2.0 Design Needed ASAP!!!

Groupla

We are an established group of websites based in the UK and are launching a new site. Consumer orientated, we are always looking to find new ways to save people money.

We aim to target the general consumer, there are no specifics. The website will later be copied into the international market.

We require a design for a Group Buying Deals website similar to Groupon.com and buywithme.com. The website will feature a different deal every day customized to the users location e.g city. We want to have a theme of family, friends and work colleagues as the basis of the website is getting people involved to spread the word about the daily deals, referring friends and family to the website using online social sites, email and twitter etc. The more people that buy, the cheaper the deal. We want to have characters featured on the website – friendly, warm and smooth edged. We were also thinking about utilizing a bug theme (groups) – for instance ants (like letsbuyit.com) or aliens etc. We are totally open to any ideas you may have. We essentially want to portray happy users saving money and being social through using our service. We also need to capture the image of friends bringing on friends – spreading the word! We would also like to be able to show that its welcoming to a diverse group of people, possibly doing this by having young children characters and/or grandparent characters.
It must have a large countdown timer on every page along with how many people have bought the coupon. There needs to be a certain amount of people who have bought it before it can go live. So if we could have something along the lines of "20 people have bought the coupon.. The deal is live". We want people to buy - We need a buy it now button preferably large so that its easy for the user to navigate.
Please try not to clutter the page, we want the focus to be on the deal, the time left, how many people have bought - whether the deal is live and the option to buy the coupon.
Colour theme is up to you, we want it to be modern and smooth web2.0 style. One idea we had was using pale greens and blues. Another was boldish blue and pink a little like flikr.com