[JacquiiDesigns]

Yeah - a custom skin design would definitely help - The default "ice blue" is very drab. Even a nice custom logo you could put on all your skins would help pique interest in your forum... Use the "don't judge a book by it's cover" mentality, as your users sure will. That is to say - they're judging your forum by the look of it. You want to entice prospective Members because your forum is gorgeous and unique

Some additional things may be of interest (partially quoted from a post on TAZ...):

Usually there is only one reason a site fails. That is - because there hasn't been a steady PROMOTION of the site. A few things that would help with promoting your forum and letting people know that it's still online:

Inactive Users Email Reminders For 3.7.x
Wonderful modification that sends out timed emails to inactive users, reminding them that the forum is still online.

Try Welcome Headers modification. No matter the forum niche - You can list all of your forum features in your welcome header and have your prospective Members salivating to register LOL - Once you have your new member registered - it's usually a good thing to send them a welcome PM - which can be sent automatically via the AdminCP settings. It's usually a good thing to make 'em feel at home by dropping 'em a personal welcome message in the profile

There's a lot of ideas to make a forum successful and popular - Promote Promote Promote is the ideology I've used. How about an Invitation System - you can encourage your Members to invite their friends to the forum and such... Hasann on vB.org has an invitation system that seems to do rather well - He's an excellent coder - may wanna check it out.

Anyway - using the Promote Promote Promote ideology, it's all up to the Administrator really. Once you've established a bit of activity - you still promote the forum.

Jacquii.