It's true, the layout is a reflection of the community. It portrays how professional the service is, how people should act, and now new members will see the board as, at first glance. Basically, a layout can make or break a community.

My idea is this. I think the community would be even better if we had a different layout. I noticed that the design we currently have uses no image, showing it to be more conveinient, bandwidth-wise. Granted, that works, but it would be a lot cooler if we did dab some images into the board. Sure it will leech off revenue but the community would look a lot nicer.

Studies show most members come for the content and stay for the layout. If a layout proves more appealing, people would like it even more here. And a few images would do that. Not a lot, just few.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Best,
Andy

This post has been edited by microscopic^earthling: Oct 23 2005, 12:16 PM

Cube Domain (Andy),

Great suggestion; currently, as you may or may not know, we are working on some form of "new layout". While that may or may not imply that we plan on a new template is more up to the paying administrators, !

Nonetheless, thanks for idea and we may look into it!

Listening to the people,
HTML_Guru

Are you using th elite skin? or the ambience one. Because although the ambience skin has no large images, it's design uses lots of small images for borders and what not, and I think it looks very nice.

~Viz

You know where those skins come from lol.

I think he means a more personal skin. One that the admin/mods have created.

Recently, many sites that I go on are having a re-hall of their designs. For example, webmaster-talk recently upgraded their forums and made a new template. I personally think it looks good (with room for improvement).

I personally always use the lo-fi version. A lot easier on the eyes.

I agree, a new layout would be great. I would like to add that all the very light colors are exhausting for the eyes. Maybe you should consider a little bit more cozy design :-) This one reminds me a little bit of toothpaste ;-) but I have to admit that my toothpaste taste is a little odd. ^^ It is nice though, but if you spend a lof of time at a site you also want some variation from time to time :-)

I would stick to general layout, like, this lite version, but I would just change it's color scheme to something specific, like DevianArt... something that will be eyecatchy, and all in the same color tones...

yes the layout really needs a change but i understand (being a webmaster and forum admin myself) that this is pretty hard, especially when you have alot of hacks installed, it looks with astahost that if they decided to add a new layout they are going to have to add all the ads, "similar threads", "last posts", "last threads", credit system" they have to install all these into the new layout which can be a very tedious proccess, a new thread would be a nice change, but it can be very difficult

and personally i dont really like the elite skin, looks messy and un proffesional, but i like the ambience skin

If they decide to change the layout, it would not be so hard. With a community of web designers and developers, it would take less than a day to do.

i agree here