How to keep a clean index
 

This tutorial will hopefully teach you how to keep your forum index, and such as clean as possible, and will most likely attract more members ;)

First of all, always stick with a nice clean skin. Don't have all of this crap you don't need, just keep it down to a banner, navbar, the forums, then the small footer.

Whenever installing modifications that go on another page (i.e. ishop, icash, ibproarcade...), personally I hate seeing peoples sites that have their navbar full of links to this stuff. Just post an announcement, with a link to the page, instead of a navbar link.

Also, modifications should be kept to 1 or 2 on your homepage. Some forums like to have a chatbox, and that's fine, but you should keep only that modification, no more. Loading up the forum homepage with modifications is a huge turn-off for newcomers.

On your forums, keep the forum descriptions down to only a few lines. Having a huge forum description taking up half of the homepage, will really not attract newcomers, and will probably make people quit also. (By description, I mean each forum section has a title, and a description, it's that)

Enjoy another tutorial by me.

Nice article, and an interesting topic to cover. Now, I'll admit my own personal site has probably way too many links in the navigation, albeit because of the somewhat high amount of modifications and features, but you're right. You should also cover maybe hiding some links in drop down members, and removing some useless things (like member list, which prior to 3.8 takes up valuable navbar space).

Agreed with the modification thing. The worst examples of this in my opinion are quick register forms, top X stats mods and various other rather pointless things (such as any clocks certain forums display for no apparent reason).

As for keeping forum descriptions short... true, I've seen people actually do things like throw shoutboxes in descriptions and the registration info in one saying 'Why to Register'. Heck, I think I even saw stuff like whole forums devoted for 'Rules' or the like, which is kind of overkill and a waste of space.

Thanks very much :)

I love people like you, who give a good review on an article. That's why I shall be writing more.

You own DS Ultimate? Some skins do look too crowded in the navbar.. You should remove some of that.

Yeah, I own said forum. And yes, I should remove some clutter in some styles, and it's most probably because some styles haven't been updated and some links should have been removed.