The appearance of your free phpBB forum.
As a lot of you people probably know, having a personal site can be a challenge, a lot of fun, and it can give quite a profit if it becomes popular enough. However, this isn’t as easy as it sounds - not by a long shot. Making a website of your own is a lot of work, and there are several things you have to pay attention to. We’ll mention some of the points, but obviously there’s more to it than abiding those few tips to make your website popular.
Layout
A lot of people make mistakes with how the site looks. They use a heavily overused layout, they try to make one themselves but it doesn’t quite work out, things like that. A few golden rules are:
- Never, ever, use an image as a background.
- Better to borrow a good thing, than to make a crappy one.
- Homemade is better, if it looks good, because it’s unique.
- People are lazy. Make the menu easy to use.
- Use CSS to make sure the links and such are changed in appearance, so they fit with the rest of the site.
The sites breaking one or more of these rules usually don’t live a long life. And the life they do lead, is filled with ridicule and laughter. All in all - bad choice to break these rules.
Font / Colors
Colors used on a site are very important. If you use clashing colors, people will often close the site right away. Also, don’t overuse the strong colors like bright red, purple or yellow. Another very bad thing to do is to use giant fonts, or barely readable ones. Always ask the honest opinion of multiple other people before publishing the website, both for the colors and the layout. This saves you from people whining about how the webmaster must be color-blind and things of the like.
Using font size 342, in bold italics with a red color will just annoy people. It won’t motivate them to visit your forum, nor will it draw their attention in any non-negative way. You can use bigger fonts or colors, of course, but do so in moderation. It’ll draw a bit of attention, and it won’t look like you’re desperately trying to get said attention.
Wrong colors choice:
Good colors choice:
Content
Another thing we often see is people grabbing a few (ranging from some, to dozens, to sometimes even hundreds of) links to videos, flash games, and news articles. This just won’t work. These sites are just leeching the content of other sites, and thus trying to become great with an others achievements. This is something you have to avoid at all cost. You need original content. Write it yourself, get someone else to write it, whatever. Just make sure you have at least some things that aren’t copied off another site.