I have taken my old Romanian webmaster forums from MyBB, which has been pretty nice for me to use over the past 5 years and decided to use one of my VB licenses and also try a 'minimalist' design. I am not the designer to do this, since I like a lot of colors and effects, but I did my best to make it look like a 'proper' webmaster forums.
So far we've received raving feedback from people who saw it, would like to hear from the sitepoint community if it looks OK.
template is not bad but you must focus on feature you are trying to provide, also i think you must provide translation page or translation service from google translator.
Even though I don't understand the language, I think the website and navigation is structured well and easy to figure out. I think the minimalist design works well - a more cluttered design could compete for attention. I like the colors too. The website is interesting to me and I would like to read the information. A translation service like Musicbox mentioned would be beneficial - and could bring in more users.
It's vBull 4, so I'm going to have little if anything nice to say about it. It's an annoying fixed width, absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts, and it's chock to the gills with vBulls wasteful bloated markup and ajax for NOTHING.... which is why the home page ends up 433k all-together (334k) to do around 70k's job. That 163k of that is javascript is just -- WOW, what ineptitude.
But that's vBull for you. Again, they have massive brass monkey balls charging money for that trash.
Once I zoom in 50%, the color choices aren't too bad, I don't entirely disapprove of the graphics -- and usually I piss on the use of serif fonts but you used them in a very tasteful manner.
Get that design into a fluid layout (or at the very least semi-fluid) so I could actually use it on my netbook, get dynamic fonts on it so I don't have to dive for the zoom to make it useful on my desktop, and get it off that garbage train wreck called vBull, and you might be on to something. I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but you were probably better off on phpBB -- though I'd be looking more at SMF or myBB for it. (myBB is still young, has a lot of rookie faults and I can't stand skinning it -- but it's getting better)
Your template is really nice, but I got to say there is too much on that page, too many menus and too many options, I would probably leave the page before making my mind of checking them.
My suggestion to improve the website is to get rid of one of the above menus.
The design of the forum is ok, the thing that i say ok and not super, awesome is because i don't like that splashy blue as background, try to change to something lighter or a grey..
I like the header menu design and i also think you should center it. Regarding the layout of the second menu Īnceput, Domenii, you should make it a web 2.0 design, add some shadows, make a bit 3d.
Also if you don't have a translation service added, into english at least, it means you have targeted Romania only, you should have chosen a .ro domain.
My overall score is 8/10. (Baftă) Good luck (in translation) my fellow Romanian .
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