Design Concept/Solution: Brain Noodles Site

So for the past month or so I've been working quite diligently on a freelance project for Brain Noodles LLC. I designed their original site about a year ago with the focus of the site to just create a little buzz about Brain Noodles. It had nothing to do with a shopping cart or building this content-rich site. It was almost like an ad for this new craft product. Well fast forward one year and I find myself basically redoing the site. This was an exciting opportunity because while since doing the site a year ago I have learned a lot and I feel I have improved. I do say though, that between school, catering, freelancing, and art director at A5, my life has been rather hectic (Thank you Chelsea for your patience that is probably tested everyday). But I really do feel this as a great and exciting project. As the designer for the site I am trying my hardest to make sure that this site gets exposure as much as possible. I really want it to grow, as success for them, is success for me. A lot of my spare time has been research for this site and just trying to improve whatever I can. So I hope a little inkling of that determination shows through in this rather quirky site. So I guess let me get to the actual design stuff of the site.
The first design of the site consisted of a flash page that told a little bit about what Brain Noodles were, some suggestions on what to do, etc. - nothing too serious. About a month ago, I was contacted with some changes to the site and after some discussion we put into motion a change from the flash page to a HTML based site. This was to conform better to the search engines and also make visitor navigation easier. So the visitor navigation was changed to the one seen today on the left side of the screen. I tried to keep the mood light and fun - a theme carried over from the old design. The front page was to feature just a few important things on the site..including things you can make with Brain Noodles, store locator and their new products. From there we went through creating a teachers page, rebuilding the shopping page to use more of a inventory based system. An arts and crafts page (still sort of working on this as I'm writing this). A store locator for all the places you can find Brain Noodles. Plus creating countless graphics and changes to copy. I feel the site is starting to become 'beefed up.' I'm hoping this is only the beginning. While I'm slowly improving the site, I'm hoping the idea will really take off so we can get some user interaction. The main focus I want to build is what you can do with the noodles - and my goal is to get customers to show us. These are the ones with the creativity and the ideas. Painters use paint, I use the computer - someone out there is bound to use Brain Noodles. well thats all I got, be a pal and take a minute and check out the site, tell some friends that might like this sort of thing, Hell I don't even do crafts and I am excited about it! Anyways without further delay...the site: http://www.brainnoodle.net