I started by talking to Jadiel who is bringing in the project. He showed me the old site to have an idea of the content. Then I went on an rampage of looking at websites linked from my favorite design blogs: PSDTuts, Smashing Magazine, and Abduzeedo. I screenshoted elements I liked and did a quick sketch of the layout on paper. For the colors I used Kuler, an Adobe project that lets you either create a palette from scratch, search for popular palettes and also upload an image and pick colors from it. I upload a picture of the front of the drivers last car. Then it was off to Photoshop, setting up a typical 8px based grid and did a quick mockup, which I like a lot.