Not that anybody asked for it, but I noodled around with the CSS for a few minutes to try to make it more appealing. See below. I really think you want to be very judicious with the use of the Blazers red. It very quickly overwhelms the page--especially when reading lots of text it gets very hard on the eyes. I prefer more compact layouts in something like this. The less scrolling, the better. Liberal white space is nice when you are trying to attract casual users, but it's not so great for people seeking deep content. (One of the reasons Reddit is so popular. It's crammed with great content, and people look beyond the somewhat claustrophobic style because it's so easy to consume.)
Shit. I lost my css changes when I closed the tab. Alas, the folly of Chrome developer. Anyway, I meant to get rid of the white space above the red bar to tighten the posts together more. I'd probably also slide the "Like Quote Reply" grey container to the bottom of the post. Seems weird having it floating there in space.
I have to work today and i'm going to the game tonight so i'll just have to wait a bit until i have a chance to figure all the new angles out on the site. I did make it through however. Have fun all and see ya Sunday or maybe Saturday late?
A few other thoughts. You really should set up some 301 redirects for the new Portland home page. I clicked my bookmark first and it errored out to an ugly page. Only after I typed in ripcitytwo.com did it work. You're going to both confuse users and lose Google SERP rankings if you don't do this. I'd make it my top priority were I in your shoes (and I have been in the past!) Also, throw in a favicon sometime soon. It's a little thing, but it's just weird to not see one in there, and it'd only take 5 minutes.
Also, down the line you really should update your Title and Description metatags. They are really terrible right now for SEO: <title>Portland Trail Blazers | SportsTwo</title> <meta name="description" content="R.I.P. MGB & Gambitnut" /> This signals to Google that you want to be indexed for Portland Trail Blazers (good!) and "R.I.P", "MGB" and "Gambitnut" (bad!) I mean, I have nothing against the sentiment of mourning valuable posters, but in terms of acquiring new users there are far better words you want to appear in search engines for. I'd change it to: <title>Portland Trail Blazers Official NBA Forum Discussion Board</title> <meta name="description" content="Trailblazers' largest bulletin board community, featuring fan posts about games, news, trades, highlights, playoffs and other NBA activities. RipCityTwo.com." /> I loaded this with keywords likely to attract google relevant searches, while also presenting something that would be attractive (and likely clicked) in a SERP (search engine response page.) I purposefully misspelled Trailblazers in the description because people often do that, and there's a chance it might help in getting clicks.
thanks for the tips, mook. I have a fairly long todo list and among them is the redirection issue. Not only for your bookmarks and SEO, but for all the links within posts that have old vB4 site URLs that no longer work. As for the CSS, feel free to suggest specific changes. As I was working on the skin, it was at first hard to distinguish where one post ended and the next one started. They had a single pixel light blue dashed border between and only white everywhere.
Yeah, I know it's a fair amount of stuff to consider when moving a site to a new CMS. In terms of suggesting CSS, it's really too clunky to go through and spell out each specifically. I'd need access to the CSS file directly to do that, and I really don't have the time (and I don't know if you want to offer me security anyway for that.) I just went through and modified the page in Chrome/More tools/Developer Tools. From there updating CSS is pretty easy to figure out. I did it again below for the home page: I strongly suggest taking a few minutes at http://www.nba.com/blazers/. Some elements they use could definitely apply here: - No gradients (except very light grey vertical), no extraneous thin borders. Rounded corners should almost never be used. - No use of lighter reds, as they look pink (unmanly). Stick just with #E1373E. It's basically a three color pallet - solid red, black and white. Use the red primarily for accents--never in big swatches unless you are purposefully trying to make people ignore everything else on the page. - All major text areas in pure white. - Eliminate visual clutter whenever possible. A lot of the above design rules are what's fashionable among many top sites now. "Flat" design is so hot right now. lol. I didn't follow all those rules above, mostly because I ran out of time.
Like to point out that again, the Blazers Rip City 2 pane on the Blazers website is filled with Bono can't play guitar, Mets, TV show threads and little Blazer content. Why are these OT threads filling up a basketball home page pane?
If you want to google around for replacement themes and suggest one, please do. It's really easy to tweak the CSS in the dev tools and get changes to appear, but another to go edit the actual CSS files and see that a rule affects numerous elements on various pages. FWIW.
Here's a nice flat style: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flat-awesome.3409/ But the guy who made it wrote this: The "merge feature" may work well now, but not with xenforo 1.5 templates.
Lol. I was just about to post a link to this, but the above issue is the biggest problem I see as well. It's a little spooky when somebody develops a template that strips out so many features, even if they are lame features. You never know if newer versions will require them. Long-term compatibility is pretty crucial. How about this one? https://xenforo.com/community/resources/flexile.3094/
