I've attached a preliminary mock-up. Obviously, it's still extremely rough, and the buttons and icons don't really match, and the fonts aren't quite right, and it's mostly empty in terms of what the content will look like, but I want to post it before I go too much further to get some feedback. I want to get an idea if I'm going in basically the right direction in terms of colors, layout, etc. before I spend days implementing everything.
Like I said, the icons and such are not final and the final fonts will be hinted by your OS instead of Photoshop. I'm mostly just looking for feedback on the general layout, appearance, colors and such. Too red? Too beige? Too neutral? Too colorful? Too round? Too square? Too web2.0ish? Not web2.0ish enough?
A couple specific questions for the community:
Should I go with a fixed-width layout (I'd use a 960 grid optimized for 1024 and higher), or should I make it stretch? I tend to go with fixed-width 90% of the time because it's easier to implement and has superior accessibility. But a the current layout stretches and I will stick with that if it's preferred.
I plan on not supporting IE6 beyond basic functionality. The site will work, but it will look less pretty. Any strong objections? Reasonbly current versions of Firefox, Safari, IE7, IE8, Opera, Chrome, etc. will be fully supported (and probably by extension, any other Webkit or Gecko browser.)
Should I go with a multi-column layout? It's not common on forum sites, but everybody has big screens these days, even on their phone, so it makes sense to make use of all that horizontal space. It also makes the text of posts more readable to have shorter lines. There could be a persistent sidebar on the left or right hand side of the screen similar to what you usually see on blogs (see my club blog for an example).
- l19-demo01.jpg (291.86 KiB) Viewed 13635 times
. Lot less headaches. Indifferent on the multi-column layout.
