Hey everyone, it's been a while since I've been posting here.

As you may have noticed, some work has been going on concerning the website design. Yesterday, Dinadan and myself had a chat about the site and mutually agreed that we needed a fresh new look that was more fitting for the Middle-earth theme (we agreed upon a parchment colour scheme).

Anyway, work has begun on the redesign as you will have already noticed so please use this thread to post your feedback and express your opinions on the design so far. Suggestions and ideas are more than welcome also!

From what has been completed so far you can see the look that we're aiming for but there is much to be done yet.

I myself will be looking at putting more money into the website once the redesign has been completed as I intend to renew our custom domain name as well as purchasing little extras to make the browsing experience more enjoyable for you, such as ad removal.

I am also going to continue working on a feature that I started a few months ago but put aside due to other commitments.

In addition to this I am thinking of ways to get more members in and more activity, so any suggestions or help on this front would be appreciated too.

Good to see you all again, I hope you had a good christmas and a happy new year. Here's to hoping 2012 is a good year to us all.

It feels a lot fresher, and doesn't seem odd after so long with the dark theme - almost like it was meant to be like this all along! From a techie point of view, is this something you've found/downloaded or designed yourself? As before with the top navbar, if you need any buttons/bars/logos etc., I'm your man!

Cheers,
Raccy.

hi guys. you won't know me but i'm jakes partner helen and I am going to be helping with the redesign. i enjoy doing website design stuff in my freetime and enjoy graphics design. i have helped a few friends before with projects centred around site layout so hopefully i can help in delivering a design you are all happy with

The theme is a theme that I installed from hitskin and i've been editting that one. So far i've just installed the old imagesets with the addition of a couple new ones like the post thread button. Just the simple bits so far. i've also tried to tweak the setting so that the html pages that have been added on work properly with the new theme.

Next i'm going to try and make the biege borders seperating each forum black to try and make the page seem less bright. A simple task but it's making the area inside the border around the banner pitch black so i'm going to have to dive into the css to try and stop it from happening. Also jake wants the duplicate 'home' buttons at the top fixing and a new link adding for an article system, yet the acp isn't letting me delete or edit them so i'm going to have to look into that too. there's still a lot that needs doing to make it look professional imo but i will work on it between my job and hopefully it'll be finished before too long.

Looks good so far. I'd suggest tweaking the banner slightly - at the moment it's a tad too 'red' and sticks out a bit. I think it'l look better if it was toned done/muted a bit.

i've tried to take the brown from the category headers to edit the banner as you suggested. is that any better?

Yes thanks

I echo everyone else's praise. Looks great