At school I am in charge of the website for the RE Department. Over the last few years we've gone through a load of redevelopments as we've learnt more, and we've finally settled on a design we like. The design is meant to tie in with the new logo, the jigsaw piece. We weren't exactly given a lot of choice over the logo, and it is now printed on a whole load of stuff, so don't suggest changing it!

We've tested the design in a load of web browsers on a load of operating systems (as many as we could get our hands on ) and we haven't found any problems yet, but I am sure you will spot some.

http://www.tringre.co.uk/

Feel free to sign up to the forum if you want It's meant as a sort of floor for debate on any sort of moral, philosophical or similar sort of issues/questions you like, as well as the themes of religion/agnosticism/atheism.

At the moment, the RSS feed link requires you to log in to the forum. This is something we are working on fixing as a priority. It kinda defeats the point of an RSS feed if you have to visit the site to read it We are also working on theming phpBB to tie in with the site better, although the current colour scheme is OK.

Any comments, criticism, hints, tips or anything really are welcome. Thanks!

I like the design. Simple and uncluttered
My suggestions:
Your png images could easily be a jpg which would trim the file size down quite a bit. I also suggest using a contact form for emails rather than mailo: as many users use webmail which would mean right-click and copy link, to avoid the loading of outlook express etc.

Nice. Easy on the eyes.

Does need a Skin for the phpbb that ties into the main page, though.
Start with adding the puzzle logo to the Forum, I think.
And softening some of the 'shapes' of the Forum layout boxes.

Good luck with it.

I get jagged text for the "Welcome..." I highlighted it to make sure you see it. I'm using Opera to view it; in Firefox it looks fine.



Hmm? If the forum gets popular, let me know?

I'm assuming the forum will soon have a lot of catergories other than "Ultimate Questions."

The PNGs were used for transparency (IE is served JPGs) but it might be possible to replace the PNGs with the JPGs, as long as they still look OK. As for the mailto: links, I see your point, but replacing it with a contact form annoys people (like myself) who like to use their email applications. We will look into it again though.



The last time I tried to skin the forums I just managed to turn them bright orange I'll need to take a good look at the docs before I try it again. Hopefully we will be able to use the same sorts of gradients from the main site in the forum, along with text colours and the background.



I've never seen that one before After looking around it seems like Opera makes text jagged on transparent images unless you explicitly set a background colour. It should be an easy fix, and thanks for spotting it.



Yeah, we are working on a list of categories and forums we want at the moment, and they will hopefully be added fairly soon.

Thanks to all of you for your suggestions and support.

I agree with dunkjmcd on this rather minor issue. You can create some very good javascripts that look like email applications that compensate for contact form's lack of interface. By using mailto: links, you're asking for spam, either from bots or other people.

It's a brilliant design though. The only thing I can criticise it with is that when you click on a link and end up on a page, like this one (.), the logo in the top-left does not take you back to the homepage.