Discreet site reviews.

[RagingPenguin]

Aaron,

I feel I can say, now that I am no longer in consideration for botm, that your site is really the bomb. Some areas I couldn't see into because I was a guest, but I can sort of project what they'd look like based on the rest. One thing I might do is to change the css just a bit. THe frameset border is white and it really sticks out. Try adding this to the 'custom' box at the bottom of the css editor.

framset { border: 1px solid #aaaaaa; }

That is still a good color, but more subdued. Being a tad darker, it also doesn't make that border seem as wide. Play with the color a tad if you wish. I am not sure the arcade really belongs there since most of the games don't have anything to do with SM or any other hero. I always try to do things other people don't, and the arcade hack is quite common. Your site though, is very UN-common, both in quality content and presentation. I usually only stick to judging the default style of a site, and rarely change even when I join, but I must say too that I really like the Reeves tribute skin. That's just really nice. I guess the main thing here is to try and refine your focus just a tad, and get rid of anything that might detract from that. There are other sites, dedicated to games, one can go to.

[RagingPenguin]

Deviant,

Rarely do i come across a site that I just don't like, but this one comes close. I feel bad in saying that because I try real hard not to be too critical and remain mindful of one's efforts. The first thing that threw me was that splash page. I sat there watching the flash words appear, not realizing there was a 'skip intro' link to the borrom right. You either need to make that more immediately visible, or scrap that page. If I had seen this while randomly surfing, I would've left immediately. Nobody wants to wait on workds to appear, or scroll into view, especially those on dialup who may have to wait for the page in the first place. Your style itself, is not bad at all. Nuetral colors work great most of the time. I am not sure I liked all the scrolling info blocks though. Try to stay away from things that depend on javascript. No telling who has it disabled. Your block titles need to be in a bigger font, or darker. They just don't stand out as delimiters. I found the little blurb in the top center block about your site topic a bit uninformative as well. Telling a user that the answer to what your site is about is within the articles present is a major booboo. Maybe the only people who go there will already know? I have no clue. Again, if I had read that while randomly surfing my first reaction would have been to assume you just didn't feel like putting the effort forth in properly explaining your topic. Somet topics are just obvious, some, like yours, aren't. I am not sure I liked your cellspacing setting either. Not having a visible border of any sort made your forumhome look a bit disorganised, having several mixtures of layout present within the same section just looked odd. Namely, the listing of subforums. Why does your 'Forum Closed' icon not match the others in size or color? I'd stay away from the red fonts in your dropdown since red typically indicates an error state, unless it truly fits the style. In your case, I don't believe it does. Overall the site is nice. Really, it is, but I had a hard time figuring out, even after looking at it for a while, what it was really about.

I hope this was taken in the spirit intended. That being honest constructive criticism from an 'outsider' to your topic. I wish you the best of luck.

[Blue Moose Aaron]

Aaron,

I feel I can say, now that I am no longer in consideration for botm, that your site is really the bomb. Some areas I couldn't see into because I was a guest, but I can sort of project what they'd look like based on the rest. One thing I might do is to change the css just a bit. THe frameset border is white and it really sticks out. Try adding this to the 'custom' box at the bottom of the css editor.

framset { border: 1px solid #aaaaaa; }

That is still a good color, but more subdued. Being a tad darker, it also doesn't make that border seem as wide. Play with the color a tad if you wish. I am not sure the arcade really belongs there since most of the games don't have anything to do with SM or any other hero. I always try to do things other people don't, and the arcade hack is quite common. Your site though, is very UN-common, both in quality content and presentation. I usually only stick to judging the default style of a site, and rarely change even when I join, but I must say too that I really like the Reeves tribute skin. That's just really nice. I guess the main thing here is to try and refine your focus just a tad, and get rid of anything that might detract from that. There are other sites, dedicated to games, one can go to.

Thanks, that is sound advice and I will take it all into consideration. I appreciate it.

[Lizard King]

How about
Default Style : http://forum.ayyas.com/index.php?styleid=48
Leaf : http://forum.ayyas.com/index.php?styleid=37
Funeral : http://forum.ayyas.com/index.php?styleid=30

The language is Turkish

[RagingPenguin]

Thanks for warning me about the lang. Hehe. I don't speak or read Turkish so unless you explain it here, I have zero clue as to what the site is about. Therefore I'll stick to the styles.

All styles listed above were very nice. They were crisp, clean, and not too heavy on images. The icons and buttons were all nicely redone to your styles themes. The first theme listed did have a small consideration though. Your default link color for that one is darker than the normal font color. I found that odd. It may be just me though, but I'd switch the two colors. Links should stand out. The red hover color was fine. In the second skin, this was better, but in this case, they were the same color. I still think the links should stand our more than that. In one or two places, such as theads, I found the font size rather small at high reslutions but I know it's hard to find a good balance at times. Overall, I'd say you did a great job on these. They even scaled well to smaller resolutions.

[RagingPenguin]

Aaron, play with your css for the frameset, wysiwyg, input, button and select and see how close you can get to the attached image. In retrospect, it occurred to me that with all the darkness your theme offers, the white backgrounds here just hit you like a ton of bricks.

[Blue Moose Aaron]

I could change it to a gray or soothing light blue, but I'm not too keen on the gold inputs

[RagingPenguin]

Gray would work too. Something to lessen the stark white.

[Blue Moose Aaron]

Excellent suggestion, I'll get to it tonight

[Lizard King]

Thanks for warning me about the lang. Hehe. I don't speak or read Turkish so unless you explain it here, I have zero clue as to what the site is about. Therefore I'll stick to the styles.

The site name Ayyas means Drunkard in English . Most of the members love drinking just for joy and spending good time. We have different categories in out forum. The main thing we want is keep good relationship between members. Most of the members are really close friends. We believe talking and sharing everything you think is the most important thing in a community thats why we don't have lots or rules. Also our site slogan is Keep Talking which we were inspired from my favorite band Pink Floyd
We have categories to talk about philosophy , music ( mostly metal , rock , jazz and blues ) , members own writings ( poems etc... ) , games , cinema and frp. We have some other categories but they are not so important as these categories.
We have vbadvanced CMPS as our home page and have Geek Articles ( we use for music biografies ) , Ucash , vbArcade , vba Gallery and some other mods installed.

All styles listed above were very nice. They were crisp, clean, and not too heavy on images. The icons and buttons were all nicely redone to your styles themes. The first theme listed did have a small consideration though. Your default link color for that one is darker than the normal font color. I found that odd. It may be just me though, but I'd switch the two colors. Links should stand out. The red hover color was fine. In the second skin, this was better, but in this case, they were the same color. I still think the links should stand our more than that. In one or two places, such as theads, I found the font size rather small at high reslutions but I know it's hard to find a good balance at times. Overall, I'd say you did a great job on these. They even scaled well to smaller resolutions.

Thanks for your comments about styles. I can never say i am really good in html or design but we are trying our best to keep our styles unique for our site and we are trying to make all styles by ourself. Yep sometimes I can get some ideas when I browse other websites but I never want to copy everything from the sites. For example we have a style Ice Cold which i was inspired from vbulletin.org For the links advise i'll strongly consider that.

[RagingPenguin]

That's something I've never understood. That is, the level at which 'inspiration' and 'influence' becomes 'copying'. Let's face it, we all view at least twenty new sites a day, if you're a regular surfer/searcher. It's unrealistic to say we, as stylists, will never come close to looking like another site, in any degree. We are influence by every site we see, regardless of how long we looked at it, or how much we liked it. It's like genetics, hopefully minute elements of a great many sites will come together in our minds to create something new. But like genetics, sometimes it's close to something else too, that doesn't mean somebody was directly copying another.

This was just food for thought regarding Liz's comment above. Read it, remember it, but don't discuss it here. Wrong thread.