[Talisman]

Your site looks good. I really like the logo header.

At ours, the tabmenu layout we use came from the vbPortal add-on (phpportals.com) ... so that gave us continuity on all our pages, the sidebar down the left side, and our basic blue/white color scheme. In your case, a nice set of buttons would be a big help. I'm not sure what to suggest for those. (Sorry.)

Your blue and white scheme works great for a watersports group. (Our community is for "virtual" sailors, so we have some similarity.) Really, I think all you're missing there is an accent color. Maybe you'll want to add either red or green or purple or a mauve-ish/peachy/rose pink (?) to those nice, watery shades of blue. The logo we selected had gold in it, so I went with that. But any third color works just as well.

I wanted something simple for us..... nothing real high tech (which means a lot of vb-folks here might think it's too boring.) But I just looked for real small details I could add..... or replace. If nothing else, that's a start.

1. You mentioned the breadcrumb. That shows up everywhere, so this change makes a big difference. (Ours is a little golden sailboat.) Maybe you'd use a ball or a canoe or a splash of water?

2. Changing the vB icon down the side of your forum is easy too. And that adds interest/color.

3. I like using white space between the forums, too, so we have that. We also use the welcome panel and I took the suggestion to add a small golden bar to our forum headings. (Insert a blank, one-pixel row using gold for the background color.)

These are such minor changes, they're probably not worth mentioning. But it works okay for us and you've already mentioned most of this.

Anyway, you can see how we use these details here....