Not enough styles
 

With updates and patches coming every few weeks it's risky investing in the time and effort to make a good looking style.

I'm probably to picky about site graphics / layout but, that's just one of the main reasons I keep a site up and running.

Any tips on putting together a style that will 1. maintain it's functionality, 2. look good, 3. Last longer than all the updates and patches that come flying at me every few weeks?

Paid skins are normally updated much faster than free skins, you might wanna go in that direction. :D

That's somewhat true. The skins I paid for though, when I was using vB 3.8.x, never got updated to vB 4. I guess that was because of the major change in how templates/styles are coded in vB 4. And as far as I know, the site no longer exists where I got them from. So, I made my own :D

+1 to this, also paid skin shops usually have one or two free skins that they keep updated with the rest of their usual styles, and fixes are usually released for them just as quick if not a little bit slower than their paid skins.

At least I've noticed skins that fall under that category are well maintained compared to the random single skin jobs, that are fixed willy nilly.

When you make your own you have the advantage. If something breaks you know what it is and where it is. It's then a simple matter of making repairs.
With aftermarket skins you have to wait for a 3rd party coder to make the repairs and release the updated skin..

Exactly :) All of my skins get updated to the newest version within 1 hour after upgrading....usually :D

I'll third that.

If you want to have a ton of different styles i would make them all very similar (in terms of template changes behind them, graphics can differ a lot) and make the template changes in one mother style. Makes the upgrade much faster since you just have to fix one style (and perhaps some stylevars if vb changes something there).

Thanks for all the responses guys.