MNSubaru.com

[wrx1]

Hello, my name is Russ and I am the site admin for MNSubaru.com. We have been "online" since 1999, but our group really started growing around 2002. In 2004 we made the jump to VB running on shared hosting. About 3 years ago we finally outgrew bluehost and made the jump to Linode which we are currently running. We are running 2 512mb nodes with APC and memcache running.

We made the jump to VB4.0 after it was released and it has been pretty much all down hill from there. I thought we would use the blogs and CMS more than we really did. We had 2 active blogs and about 5 total blogs. Our CMS was more of a portal/landing page that most people didn't even know we used for news and such. Then VB just turned into VBloat with tons of bells and whistles that I didn't use and didn't want installed.

August 1st I finally did the cutover to Xenforo. Slowly but surely I am getting everything up and running and dialed in. Currently we are just using some of the free styles from here, but in the future I plan on doing up a couple of custom themes to give the site our own feel. We did the cutover at 600k+ posts and 2600+ users. Not one problem with the VB to XF import.

I am looking for things that people like/don't like or ideas to help improve the overall feel of the site. So far the only things that I have really done is add a couple of theme options and a couple of extra add-ons (tapatalk, widget framwork, donations, seperate stickie/normal). Next up will getting a custom page setup for our supporting vendors/dealers.

Thanks for all feedback.

Russ

 

[kkm323]

maybe you should include, why should i sign up in your site? what am i going to benefit ?
remember this is your homepage so make it look active

 

[Digital Doctor]

Cool site.
The Logo seems off to my eyes.
Doesn't stand out enough ?
maybe a tiny white line outlining all the letters ... MNSubaru ?
or maybe a streak in the middle ?

Not sure.

 

[Vilandra]

I think it looks very nice The one thing I would change is to remove/move over the vertical line separating the node icon and the node title/description on the index page. Having them touching immediately drew my eye and looked off. Just a suggestion - hope that helps

 

[wrx1]

Thanks for the feedback.

One of the items I need to take care of is creating a page for the benefits of becoming a site member and such. I am back on my crazy work hours again, so hopefully I will get some time to really start digging into some of the small items I need to take care of.

Russ

 

[wrx1]

Back to the top with a couple of updates.

I made the move to 1.1 and it was about as simple as it gets. I have also spent the past day and a half try to get everything as snappy as possible. APC and Memchaced dialed in, optimizing icons, etc.

Next up on my list is getting my themes sorted out to the new 1.1 and getting those optimized. I am not sure if I want to create a custom theme, or just work on the ones that I have. A lot of it will be based on my workload, so if my real job stays a little slow, I might try and venture into creating my own theme.

So once again, I am looking for a bit of feedback. Mostly on site speed and thing that could go well with our cummunity.

Thanks
Russ