Howdy

First post, woo!

shes looking extremely good bud

Chris, you should take a creativity class. Don't get me wrong, the site does look great as all your designs do, they are just all the same.

Think outside the bun.

P.S. I hope your good with constructive critisicm.

lol Dave, there are only so many ways you can design a forum My aim is to make them as accesible and useable as possible.

I'm looking mostly at your design elements and color. Yes a forum is limited to a certain shape (perse) but the colors are interchangeable. I think if you made this very same design with green and khaki it would look very refreshing.

I always use blue as the base theme (and this time, splashes of green and yellow , because your right, one color is boring). Blue is soothing and easy on the eyes, especially when you are in an environment where a lot of reading is going to be taking place.

Blue is:

1. Profession : Blue portrays a professional feeling
2. Soothing/Relaxing : Each color is linked with a feeling of some sort in everybody's mind, blue is "cool", relaxing, refreshing. Yellow is always identified first (the brain always see's yellows!), red is for warning etc.
3. Mixes Well : Blue can be mixed with other colors without clashing, and just about every hue of blue looks good (which, I suppose, is subject to opinoin).

When I design a site I want to be accessible, useable and confortable to as many people as possible, I choose blue with highlights liven things up.

With that said, note this is a preview and there are more "splashes" of color (yellow's and green's, I haven't found a suitable place for red yet) on my localhost.

I'm not trying to be critical Chris but perhaps I am. I understand the dynamics of the color blue and I agree that it is a cool calming color (and sell's better than all other colors) but there is more to a site than color, take eBay for instance. Thier design is hidieous when I really inspect it but when just using it I find it very intuitive and the colors help me to find navigational elements. That said, I feel you have done a good job of that here as well. I am just trying to press your creativity into hyperdrive.

I know I just wanted to explain why I always choose blue to make sure everyone knows it's more then "I like it".

I am always looking to provide unique featurette's, especially on a forum where a certain "mold" has to be filled to meet user expectation. The forum experience is mundane; a forumhome lists categories and forums, the forum page lists threads, and the thread page lists posts. An outline does have to be followed else we loose user farmiliarity, but we can always shape and color that outline to provide the right spice.

All in all, I don't think my designs all look the same. The only thing I carry accross each design I do is, well, the color blue. Other than that I use tried-and-true forum layouts to maximize on usability.

Hiya Chris. How's life been going for ya?
And Dave, how are the kids?

ON a side note the JavaScript console is yelling at me for these pages.
Error: fetch_object("currentPost") has no properties