New Message Board (old, refined site)

[CJacobson]

Hi guys! We're just about ready to announce a BRAND NEW message board... first, we need your opinions! Any suggestions about appearance, utility, search engine optimization, etc., etc.

http://forum.britishv8.org/

It's a PHP / template-based design, with lots of CSS.

The "test message forum" will let you try posting messages and attaching photos without logging in.

http://forum.britishv8.org/list.php?1

This is a brand new addition to a club website that already has about 450 pages of quality content (and about 4200 photos of British sports cars. 1600+ visitors/day.)

The message board must seamlessly match the styling and navigation of the existing site - but until we "go live", the navigation in the existing site won't be updated, so if you leave the "Web Forum" section there are no links back.

THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!

-Curtis


p.s. Let me know if I can return the favor and review your site.

[amorphic8]

I'm not sure how much of a review on the design you want, being that you stated that the forum must match the existing site, so I will leave alone everything that doesn't directly impact functionality and usability.

I'm also not sure if you wrote this yourself or if you installed a package of some sort, so I will give a brief review and if you can clarify some of those issues, I would be happy to post again with more pertinent info.

My first impression is that it doesn't look like a forum. Rather than seeing a list of forums, it looks to me like one of those click through pages that pop-up when you type the wrong URL and someone bought up something similar to try to get you to click through.
The Search and Log In links would probably be better easier to find if they were buttons or had a color other than the default text color (black). Once inside topic, the same comment applies to the "Goto" and "Options" menus. When viewing actual postings, the "Options" menu at the bottom is way too small.

Under the hood, there are some things I would change.
First, I would remove all the inline styles and reduce your dependence on <span/>s; most of them are not needed as I believe most elements can be targeted with CSS through their parents.
I realize that you are using HTML 4.0 Trans, but I would recommend removing the <center/> tag (presentational elements are so.... 1990s), especially when the same can be achieved with CSS. While you're at it, remove the &nbsp;s and <b/>s and either replace them with <strong/>s if the intention is emphasis, or make them a heading if that is what they are intended to be.

The reason why I am picking on the (technically allowable in HTML 4.0 trans) <center/> is if you view your site with CSS off, the main menu and all the submenu links are visitble (as you would expect), except that because everything is centered, it looks like a big long jumbly list of links as opposed to main categories with sub links.

You also have a number of 'align' and 'valign' attributes that are technically allowed using the doctype you have chosen, but again, since you are already using so much CSS, why not remove these deprecated attributes and write some CSS rules instead?

So I am curious to know why you picked the oldest, safest (but most outdated) doctype. Was it because you needed to use elements from the existing site that are old?

Finally, upon validation, your site pops up 2 errors which are likely typos; but it also throws several warnings for using a "/" at the end of some unary tags, <br /> for example. The reason for the warnings is that the ending slash is only required for XHTML doctypes They can probably safely be ignored, especially if you plan on eventually updating the code and moving to XHTML trans or strict. I think you are almost there anyway; if you remove the deprecated elements and attributes I mentioned above and write a few more CSS rules in their place, you will practically be ready for a more up-to-date doctype.

Well, there you have it. A neat, clean, matching design with a few spots that need adjusting both on the surface and under the hood.

Good luck, and I love the subject: looked into buying a '71 jag and a '76 Triumph but couldn't seal the deal on either one. I'll just have to admire my friends' MGs for now.

[CJacobson]

Thank you amorphic8 for EXCELLENT feedback and a detailed, thoughtful review.

Some of your suggestions will take me a few days to implement, but others are done already (such as increasing some font sizes.)

The new message board was built based on "Phorum", a free community-built PHP message board package. I like Phorum. It allows a great deal of customization... but to get the most out of it you need to hack here and there. Nominally, the basic Phorum templates produce XHTML code... but they throw LOTS of validation errors! I backed them down to HTML 4.01 transitional, and as of tonight I think I've got all pages validating.

In case you're curious, here's another Phorum board I benchmarked. Actually, it was the best one I found... MG Experience Forums but I think it throws at least 30 validation errors on every single page. Still, it's well known and well liked by a lot of the core community that partipates in our meets, etc. I want them to find my new board "familiar" feeling, while at the same time I've given them new/improved features in terms of photo attachments, a print stylesheet, etc.