Advice needed on Revamp/Improvement
 

Hi guys, i currently took over a job for maintaining a forum. Its a pretty large board with custom templates created for it long time ago. I want to change the templates to look much modern and a better layout for adsense as well.

I have very limited knowledge of running a board and i have not much guts to amend anything much as i am not sure what will go wrong if i do it. The forum is hosted on our own server and i'm very much the only person taking charge of it. Please have a look at the forum and maybe give me some comments what could be better.

I'm also at a total lost with using vbulletin so whatever advice you fellas give is probably good for me.

please help
the address > www.keeptouch.net

Congrats on the new job!

From time to time I have to manage sites like this where you come into it after it has been poked and prodded for years. It is hard making changes because you are not sure what you are going to break. :)

My #1 suggestion would be, setup a test machine somewhere. I have a couple of old PC's that I have installed LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php) on and use for testing. Basically copy the production site to your test server and make your changes there first before rolling it out on the production system.

This can save you HOURS of headache.

so you mean i can make a copy of the current production forum?

say, the files on my site now, make a copy and dump it on another server? How would one create a test site?

Please advise, i feel like a complete idiot at times when i try to figure these things out.

You can follow most of the instructions on moving servers (but don't remove the "old" board).

I am not sure is it just me.. but it took a long time to load the website..

ya... it is slow.
hmm anybody got any suggestions to make it go faster?

Would hosting the board and its database at different physical servers help?