My DVD Trading site

[Shepski]

whole site revolves around the forums. used to use xmb forum and moved over to vB and never looked back :)

Quite a few hacks and mods, and some personal mods I have added to connect/communicate with external DBs etc.

I know it may seem a little cluttered at the top but the site is now costing money each month so had to put affiliated links in promenant places.

Let me know what you think.

edit by shepski, who forgot the link! - linkypoo (http://www.dvd-swaps.co.uk/dvd2001/dvdforums/index.php)

[Tony G]

Is there a link somewhere? I can't find one.

[Dan]

Your right it is cluttered.......

Besides that.

Style looks good but does need work.
Looks like you have a good member base too.

Well thats all I can think of now to comment on. If I get anymore I'll be sure to tell you

[Buddha]

hey, another dvd freak. lol.

my suggestion would be to get rid of the HP/MP/EXP hack in the postbit. has nothing to do with dvds and just makes your postbit huge...

aside from that, you may have a number of hacks, but not too many template mods... pretty standard fare right down to the buttons. not saying that's a bad thing... just leaves little to comment on.

and i have to agree that the header is hideous. have you considered putting it on the bottom instead?

ps. if you put your edit table above the signature table in the postbit, then your signature will be baselined instead of hovering over that empty table. just a suggestion.

[Shepski]

I know what you mean about the HP thing, the users liked it and gave them a reason to start posting more, to get the "level" up which has worked nicely :)

I have now removed the bar displaying code as I think this is probably overkill but kept the "Level" thing going as users do take note of this and make posts (within our guidelines of course) to increase this which also leads to a more active looking site.

The header thing unfortunately will stay. I may reformat it in some way but not sure how as this does make me enough money to pay for the bandwidth and hosting each month, shoving it at the bottom will just not work for me as no-one will click the links if they dont see them, the top few forums are the most active so I want to make sure I get maximum exposure.

The style has more or less stayed the same as I like it. adding more graphics for borders etc will only increase my already high bandwidth so keeping it as much text and fill colours as possible is a good thing but does limit my design.

Not sure what bit your referring to in the postbit to get the siggy to sit on the bottom of the post? although, in the case of my own siggy it would cause a wrapping effect as it would overlap the report this post text on the right.

[filburt1]

The side doesn't fit in 800x600 without scrolling. Also I'm not sure you should show the banned usergroup in showgroups.

[Shepski]

I have sorted out the 800 x 600 thing, reduced the main image and removed some of the excess items in the header so nowe looks a lot tidier. cheers for the advice on that.

As far as the showing banned in showgroups...how do I remove that and where did you see it?

[Buddha]

out of curiosity, how much bandwidth you using up per month?

[Shepski]

between 7 to 8gb

getting about 60k visits and over 1.5m hits per month. not bad for a homemade site i started just so that I could get some cheap dvds when I bought my first dvd player :D

[Tony G]

Takes a bit to scroll down to the forums list - not the best thing to have.

The borders around 'Latest Review' table etc. don't look nice, too thick IMO.

And maybe you can create some DHTML dropdown menu's from your navagation at the top, as it'd suit the way you have it set out.

[Shepski]

i know what you mean about the borders but i cant seem to figure out how to get thin borders like the actual forum table ones. i have border="1" cellspacing and padding=0. What have I missed?

[Tony G]

I think border="0" gives it the vB border.

[Shepski]

its ok, i figured it out :)
need to have a css for border set to 1 pixel.

thanks anyway