Simplify Home Pages
Graham,
First of all, I love the site. The recent improvements are great. It simply works better. The overall look of the site is great. The fonts and colours are very pleasing to my eye in general. The mix of gold, slate grey, and red is well balanced. I sure understand though if someone is having problems with white on gold. Secondly, you've chosen a terrific forum engine. This is one of the slickest I've seen.
Improvements? At the risk of having the site look like so many others, I'd suggest simplifying both the very first home page (pre-logon), and the one that comes up after logon. People should see everything that is available on the site in one page. I often miss features because of having to scroll around.
Specifically, rather than showing frames with all 10 recent threads in both section and general categories, how about a single link to each of the forums? Then, single links to Floggers, public forums, news, archives, etc. In other words, a menu! That menu should be in the same place every time, and be accessible with a "home" link from any page, as it is now. I know it is one more click to get to a forum, but we have to do that anyway to see what else is there other than the top 10.
Scattered around, you could have hot new items, pic-o-the-day, features, etc. and keep the overall look and feel the same. I like the way you keep it lively with new things. That keeps me coming back. But always there'd be that solid anchor menu for we routine-oriented browsers to flee back to.
Again, wonderful job. This is going to be really special once more people are signed up.