Advice needed on my site/forum design!

[Kohhal]

Ok,

So I'm working on a new design for my site, all pages are based on vBulletin(vbIndex hack).

The frontpage is the basis for how I want the whole site to look ie. logo(will be changing slightly), colour scheme, top navigation bar and columns(some may need to be dropped depending on the page viewed).

My problems: for a start I'm not sure of the best way for the forums to look when trying to retain this design. I've done a bit with the colour scheme but I'm not happy, suggestions would be appreciated.

My biggest problem right now is getting the forums to look right with this design. On the front page the top nav menu is joined to the left column, completing the look I'm after but on any of the forum pages, the top nav menu and forum buttons are kinda just floating below the logo as there is no left column, what to do? The "white space" to the sides of the frontpage looks fine I think but not so when viewing the forum, something needs to change?

I will probably do the "space between category" template mod but something else is need to make the tables look better then? I don't want to go overboard with images on all the tables as speed is important, it just needs something else?

I might make the forum buttons the same style as the top menu ones, not sure of the best way or how to locate them though? I think I will get rid of the breadcumb too, opinions?

All other pages in the top nav menu will eventually be changed to the frontpage format, suggestions on the best way for any of them to look would also be appreciated, though I'm not worried about them too much for now.

Sorry about the length of this post, just the ideas in my head spilling out

Thanks for reading and hopefully you guys will have some suggestions for me,

G

[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....

[Tony G]

-Off image broken on forumhome.
-Try to interegate the navbar with the site navagation. It looks weird having two seperate navagations on your forumhome.
-Could use some template modifying, split categories would look good as well as the Mod Column gone as you don't seem to have many moderators to list. Allows more room on screen.
-Just creates a scroll for 800 X 600 users.

[Kohhal]

Thanks for the replies guys, much appreciated.

The colour scheme does go well with a watersports page but I'm having problems getting the whole { firstaltcolor } / { secondaltcolor } thing to look right. I had it with blue/white but the contrast between them was too much to I switched to to grey/white for now but I'm not happy. It's too bland right now, any suggestions on that?

Admittedly, a lot of the styles around are for techy sites and so don't apply in this case, simple seems to work much better, but right now my forums need something to give them that bit of quality

I've split the categories since and dropped the Mod column as suggested and it does look better, I don't see a problem with the Off image though Dexter?

As for the navbar, yep, I need to decide what to do with the forum buttons, just can't decide what. Should I go with the same as the main nav menu with a second row for forum buttons in the same style or move the buttons elsewhere maybe?

My brain is melting with this right now :hurt: