Spent the last couple of days setting up the look n feel layout. Basing the style off of default dark styling. Avoiding all template edits except for extra.less of course. Minimal add-ons hopefully. And setting up forum structure and perms.
My goal is to make upgrades and updates as easy as possible, and as user friendly as possible.
Aside from base colors, I am going to save putting lipstick and eye candy for later.
Ok, have the functionality, basic layout, feature set, forum schema, forum/staff/member permissions completely gone through. I cant say everything is perfect, but I have a good baseline of what I want and can go from there.
I am still running a stock color dark scheme, minus some alterations, no template edits, minus extral.less.
But, my worst skill, getting imagery and eye candy right. This will take some work on my part.
Well, not necessarily satisfied, but I needed something up there to give it some sense of a look. So I have a header image now, but I feel it will be replaced soon.
I opened it up today to the public, just to help hammer out any bugs and getting a simple load test. Verifying my cloudflare and analytics settings are properly setup and communicating.
OK, all seems to look good short of a real-world shakeout and load test.
As I suggested, I finally opted to go with a niche that I find both entertaining and fun. I did not go full open topic as as said, as is a bit overdone and doesn't do it for me. So I went with a couple domain names that I haven't had any real application for since buying them in a basket of names. So, I hope its entertaining at least.
I decided to make a base look and feel using the oem style and template layouts. No template edits, some style property edits, and a smattering of addons that help with my objectives. I want to make updates as smooth and easy as possible. I really need a new header image though, the placeholder image right now is just temporary to get some imagery on the site. I want to avoid too much imagery as it seems too busy to look at, so just basic forum icons.
I went with a category-less design as I felt it cleaned up some real estate as well as the niche really doesn't need any.
Cleaned up and trimmed off a few unnecessaries just to make usability nicer.
The only content I have is what I have posted to at least put something everywhere so it isn't completely empty. But hell, the site is only a week online, and content is a lifelong endeavor.
