site and design feedback

[newdeveloper]

I need advice on design, graphics, usability, etc. for my new site www.chattennis.com. Any advice would be much appreciated and please be brutally honest with your review.

[Chris]

I'm not a fan of the design. You're using relative positioning on a lot of things and while it looks fine on my resolution, as I shrink the window the logo and header text get stacked on top of each other so if I had a smaller monitor it'd be like almost everything except the logo is below the fold (bad).

The text size in that top block is also rather large.

As a forum you're better off having the root of the site go directly to the forum main page, not a type of welcome page you have right now.

this (http://www.chattennis.com/phpBB2/index.php) should be your homepage.

Your logo could also be fancier, but it isn't bad for a brand new site, I've launched sites with logos that weren't much better.

If you ever get a budget I recommend getting vbulletin instead of phpbb and springing for a custom logo. In total that'll put you back around $250 but it is worth it.

In the mean time, read the 4 articles here:

http://www.websitepublisher.net/website_management/community_management/

And this blog post:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/01/09/building-a-forum-with-bribes/

[newdeveloper]

I was planning on maybe putting money into the site for vbulletin and other things if the site shows promise.

[affiliates7]

-change your home page all forums began with the forum subject
- define your goal first it's a forum website
or a website that have a forum,
- the recommended of chris for the home page is highly recommended

[Skeewe]

Design definitelly needs work. I would put article headlines on frontpage.