Opinions on my site and style please
 

Hi
My site is Artist Trading Card Forums.
I have just updated the style and would like some opinions. Using some colors that I have never really used before, and I went very light on the graphics.

Also any suggestionson the forum layout, navigation, etc would be very much appreciated.

Thank you for any advice you give.

Wow, interesting...

Very unique, I like it. Nice job.

Quite a nice style, you used pink very well there, didn't expect pink styles to look good. :p :D

Nothing much you can improve there besides maybe your postbit. The boxed info and that, it's a bit cliche. ;)

Well done. :)

Thanks for responding.

Your right. It is a bit cliche.
I will just have to play around with a few different designs I guess.
Hopefully, whatever creative motivation that came upon me the night I decided to try Pink, will hit again.

PORTAL
As stated before, I do not like portals. But that's mostly because they are poorly organized and crammed with a bunch of crap.

Yours on the other hand, looks great. I'll give it a "8" as far as portals are concered. What keeps it from a 9? Two things:

LINKS: Your hover effects are highly inconsistant. I would brighten up the left hand menu with a lighter shade On color. I would also match your links to your tcat and make the over state just a shade lighter. The font used for navcontainer is weak and should probably be bold 12px.

MARGINS & BORDERS: I understand this is an art community and it's in your nature to blend. But the quadruple BG colors clash. you go from a grey mesh to a white border to a beige to an even lighter beige and then the cells are off-white. That's... Just too much nonsence for me. I would kill the mesh and make it light black, or cccccc and put some flowers out there or something.
Also match your content block text areas with your outside margin color and it would be a 9.


The forum looks great. Best I've seen in here all day.
Your DHTML navlinks are almost perfectly organized, but you missed a few calls (on error screen it doesn't work)
the gfx are good as well. However, you should consider killing the post icons. (They suck.)

What keeps it from a 10? Your messy gallery and the fact that there's nothing increadibly unique and amazing.



Forum: 8/10 :)

Thanks for the honest review and recomendations Brinnie. I will work on that tonight.
What is it about the galley? Do you feel it is to cramped, or just completely unorganized.

Thanks again.

Your welcome.

I see you have since taken the innitiative to clean up your gallery... not only does it look great, but the lack of information is impulsive on users to view the full image.


Nice work on the portal, but there is something about that mesh that I don't like. You might try experimenting with different colors/texures, but it's really not anything serious.

Btw, I would still kill the post icons.
Looks great.

very clean and tidy... nice colours also... very nice job!

Thank you to everyone that took the time to look and post your comments. Your insight is very helpfull.

I guess you mean the pallet icons on forum home. Those are left over from the old style. I agree...they do need to be redone.
I thought you meant the new post, old post buttons on thead in the postbit...I changed them. :nervous:

After reading you review, I softened the contrast of the background image a little, but will definitely try to experiment like you suggest.

Best regards and thanks again.

Great looking site! :up:

You have a "VALID XHTML" button but the page(s) are not valid.

Can you tell me the REASON why you are posting a "VALID XHTML" button? This is not in reference to the above statement -- I just want to know WHY you are displaying the button? You can call me curious. ;)

The only things I hate about the site is the limited contrast between text and background and the font-size.

Thanks princeton.

Excellent point. I plan to remove the button altogether. My reason is why display a button showing that your pages are valid when they should be anyway.

For now, I guess it is just a lazy way for me to check as I am finishing up the templates.

aha, you got my point :up:

lol...thats good.
Some of this is very new to me..but after reading up on current web standards, I realize the importance in doing it correctly.

one more thing,

You might consider making the 'collapsible' headers 'uncollapsible'.

Brinnie, please remind me not to post asking for a critique on my forms. You would destroy me! LOL

Wo-hoah! and here I thought <blink></blink> didn't work in FireFox. :rolleyes:

It does if you use the right javascript. ;)