Fractalforums.com Design

[cKleinhuis]

Many friends of mine are complaining about unprofessional and boring design and layout of fractalforums.com
so, the question is in what direction should a new design go ?
i have installed a few templates which you can explore in your users profile

please post here templates you think are nice to have

[Nahee_Enterprises]

    Many friends of mine are complaining about unprofessional
    and boring design and layout of fractalforums.com

The only thing unprofessional is the use of advertisements all over each web page being displayed.  But I also understand that this is the only way you will get any money coming in for running it.

And when did this Forum become a professional web site??  I thought it was for the sharing of fractal related information no matter what area.  Even now several of the people who used to share graphics in the beginning do not feel they have anything worth contributing anymore.  They see that this Forum has turned so technical that the lighter side of fractals can no longer be enjoyed here.

Or is that the new intention of this Forum??  To drive away those that do not have the mathematical/scientific knowledge and skills to keep up within the Forum.

If you become too controlling over the way the Forum is to be, such as making it "professional", then you will eventually lose many members.  And the Forum will probably die out after the current fad runs its course.
 

[cKleinhuis]

hi there,

no, i just would like to give it a more stylish look, but i believe it is better to let it in the form it is right now, so that
people have not to get used to a new design ...

about the ads ...

the index page has ads distributed between the topics list, but after that only on top and below of a page are
small banners ...

all in all i would love to leave google out of it, but right now i have not reached any publisher interested in making ads
on this site ...

[Timeroot]

Personally, I'm hardly aware of the ads at all, let alone annoyed. If it might mean more money, then I say you should maybe start doubling the amount of ads.

The design seems pretty good right now, but I could do with a "fresher" look. It's not that I don't like this one, just that sometimes change for its own sake is good.

[jwm-art]

The advertising is no problem to me as I'm using the Adblock plug-in for Firefox.

One thing I do find confusing, is the tangled web of galleries. I've given up trying to fathom it all out and just add my pictures to "My Gallery" and hope someone might actually view them from time to time (which they do, from time to time).

I think the galleries should be much simplified - and maybe by default, show more than 4 of the "recently added", and less of the "most commented/most viewed/highest rated" - just a slight adjustment somewhere there.

What about a 'front page'? For example (the only site I know (from the very few I visit) that does this) http://ardour.org ?

The front page could showcase images from the galleries, have some fairly large thumbnails - all which are equal sized (use the GD php module to crop etc) and randomly chosen on each page view (like the banner)...