Hi
Hoofbeats,
My rate scale: Poor, Fair, Good, Very Good or Excellent (Very few forums get much better than a good rate (from me) due to V5 being so new to everyone.)
First Impression: Good
I loved the purple right off the bat. It is a toned down purple and it looks great. I adore horses so you can't go wrong using a horse picture with me.
Now let's get down to the nitty gritty.
Layout: Poor (Sorry)
Your whole forum is pushed over to the left side leaving a huge gap of approx. 190px on the right. It makes the page very unbalanced. In addition, the sidebar redux is covered by the fixed side bar you have and I can't read most of what is there.
i58.tinypic.com/2d799ok.jpgI'm not quite sure why it was necessary to use both the redux and fixed side table. The fixed side table seems rather bare where maybe you could move your redux info into it or visa versa. But that is just my opinion.
I'm getting a scroll bar at the bottom of my screen. I saw this same issue with another site that was using a fixed side bar but don't know if is the same issue. I do know you will need to move your whole forum over so everyone can read info in the redux. (I'm using a rather small screen resolution (1280px) but it isn't defunct yet. lol) I'm just not sure if adding a margin-right to your wrapper will make the scroll bar bigger but you could test it out. You'd just stick this at the bottom of your css style sheet:
#wrapper{margin-right: 50px;
}
Colors, Styles and Graphics: Fair Like I said, I adore the horse banner and it looks beautiful with the colors of your forum body but the title of your forum isn't very eye-catching compared to your board titles. The text size hierarchy seems off. By that I mean, if you want someone to notice your title of your forum first, it should be the first thing your eye is drawn to. In your case, my eye is drawn to the category titles so I could just leave your site never remembering your site name, in case I wanted to come back. Once the eye sees the banner title it should be drawn to what you prefer them to see next, and so on. The size of the banner text is fine but if it were me, I'd redo all the sizes on the categories or visa-versa(make the banner text a bit larger and more eye catching) if that would be too much work.
And speaking of the category titles, perhaps I'm too nit-picky but I'm not a fan of a different font used on each category, plus none of them are placed in the same spot. I guess I like consistency. If it were me I'd reduce the size and make sure each title is in the exact same spot, pick your favorite font and go with it on all of them. Also wish you could have found images that didn't require a copyright notice on the image before using it. Are you sure they said you had to do that? The are some that will require you to link to where you are using them and give them credit somewhere. Anyway, not a huge issue. At least you are giving credit where credit is due. One last negative. I'm not crazy about the faded out oval around each image. I'd prefer just a square image. I guess it would be different if you were wanting them to fade into the background but that is not the case here and in some cases , because of the background, you lose that effect anyway. But that is just me. I have no issues with any of the other graphics used.
I do love the other font(s) you used around your site (menu links and board titles, etc). That is a cool font and so easy to read!
I also really like how there is a gradient effect in your borders around each category. Very interesting and I've never seen it done before like that so you have something very unique. I like that a lot!
Going into your boards, everything is neat a crisp. You did great on your text hierarchy there. The board titles are just slightly larger than the description text. l like that you did a subtle hover color and I like the slightly darker background behind the descriptions. Everything is very easy to read and just looks neat as can be!
I also like you used the collapse code so we don't have to scroll past many boards to find what we want.
Content: Good
I'm not a roleplayer, but looking at so many sites as I do, it looks like you have all the things you need. In fact, I can tell you put a heck of a lot of hard work into this site. Very good job. Everything looks organized and well thought out.
Overall, if I could pick one thing you must fix it would be so the layout so it isn't all squished to the one side and the redux hidden. The other thing I feel pretty strongly about, but isn't a must, is the text on the categories, as said above. The rest you can just take with a grain of salt as it is what YOU like and your members like and not what I like.
I do hope I gave you a little to think about and helped in some tiny way.
