So I took some time, and tweaked the appearance a little. And I made up some new banners.

I first want to apologize for the extreme crudity of these models. I just did not want to spend a great deal of time on formatting these templates properly, especially with the amount skin plugins available to you that take care of all that automatically. I just think what we need is:


New banners. Can you have rotating banners? I think it would be pretty cool
A dark skin; so much nicer when you are browsing in a dark room
The top of the page cleaned up. The big black bar just does not look cohesive with the rest of the page.


Here are my suggestions for a new look:

Light theme with no background (http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/cflight.html)
Light theme with a background (http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/cflight2.html)
Dark theme with no background (http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/cfdark.html)
Dark theme with a background (http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/cfdark2.html)
Dark theme with another background (http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/cfdark3.html)

And here are some banners I whipped up:

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/ctsbanner.jpg

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/escaladebanner.jpg

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/ctsvrbanner.jpg

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/grillbanner.jpg

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/eldobanner.jpg

Here are the links to the PSD files if anyone wants to try their hand at tweaking them:
http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/ctsbanner.psd
http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/escaladebanner.psd
http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/ctsvrbanner.psd
http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/grillbanner.psd
http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/eldobanner.psd

Let me know what you all think.

Nice work, Jimbo. I don't like the "dark themes." :nope:

Alot of people don't. Luckily, vBulletin lets you choose skins per user. The drop down box is already in the lower left corner. But right now there is only one skin there.

Sal self-righteously calls it --Cadillac Forum skin, when it is the standard, plain jane forum skin (common Sal :D)

You're psychic- I was just thinking of a dark skin option the other day. I find black background with white/gray text hard on the eyes (they always leave "ghosts" if I look away from the screen after a few minutes), but a middle ground would be good. I used to browse rx8club a lot, they offered a "middle" one that had a medium blue body with light blue text, and it was nice.

Check it out. (http://www.rx8club.com/?styleid=18) It's almost identical to our forum layout, so I imagine adding the skin option would be akin to "flipping a switch" somewhere.

The banners look good, Jimmy. I'd ditch the yellowish outer glow around the text for either a different color or harden it up, but that's minor. I'll tweak one later tonight.

Nice work, Jimmy! I like how we've got something for a few different models - and something for the classic guys as well.. Just keep in mind that we have one obstacle when it comes to design - we need room for a 728x90 leaderboard in the top right corner.. Auto Pride Concepts has one.. The rest are 468x60 - but the leaderboard option is important to have.. So there ARE some constraints....

You're psychic- I was just thinking of a dark skin option the other day. I find black background with white/gray text hard on the eyes (they always leave "ghosts" if I look away from the screen after a few minutes), but a middle ground would be good. I used to browse rx8club a lot, they offered a "middle" one that had a medium blue body with light blue text, and it was nice.

Check it out. (http://www.rx8club.com/?styleid=18) It's almost identical to our forum layout, so I imagine adding the skin option would be akin to "flipping a switch" somewhere.

The banners look good, Jimmy. I'd ditch the yellowish outer glow around the text for either a different color or harden it up, but that's minor. I'll tweak one later tonight.


that's pretty cool too. I always used the default skin when I was at rx8club. I probably like the dark skin so much because it is the default skin at maxima.org, so that is what I got used to on forums. But that's the beauty of user selectable skins.

I went with outer glow just because I wanted to keep the banner darkish, and the cadillacowners.com just didnt look right to me in white or grey.

Sal, can't those banner ads be on a separate line? do they have to be on the same line as our banner?

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/ctsbanner2.jpg

http://www.cooleywire.com/jimmyh/cf/banners/escaladebanner2.jpg

Nice job on everything, especially the banners. Very :cool2:

Why thank you :)

Tony is right though. Looks better without the outer glow.

I am still waiting for Sal's feedback about the advertising arrangement on top though.

Security tokens galore!