Oro Jackson - A Fan Community

Divvens

Well-known member
Hello there :)

I just launched my community yesterday (A fan community for the Japanese series "One Piece"), we were working on it for some time and I thought I'll get opinions on what you have to say about the forum.

It was my first time playing around with the looks aspect of the forum, never before had I done it. So what you see there is a noobs work, but eventually I'll try and improve!

http://orojackson.com
 
You just launched the community Sunday and it already has 1k+ post?
Darn good job! I'm impressed.
Saturday, and thanks :) Our members seem to like staying and discussing :D Though we admins created most of the content now users are starting to get more involved in discussions and creating their own threads.
 
Nice forum, good colours, a couple of things that leap out at me. First, the default speech bubbles as forum icons look out of place with your theme and colour scheme, it could look awesome with these replaced. I notice a ship on the top right, and as your favicon, would that not make a great forum read/unread icon? Second, as you have fixed width (which I am a big fan of BTW!), the header looks a little odd sitting on a slightly wider forum body with curved corners. Personally, I would reduce the forum width to exactly match the header width and then remove the curved corners, so it all sits flush and in line right down the whole left/right edges.

In the forum itself, I see you have HUGE avatars - not seen this before on a Xenforo site - whilst it's not my cup of tea, it's really good to see what it looks like, and in your theme it works well (because your members have some nice avatars). Some of the threads, with these huge avatars, some seriously over-sized member signatures, and your nice headers, are real eye candy :) So overall well done, a great looking site!
 
Nice forum, good colours, a couple of things that leap out at me. First, the default speech bubbles as forum icons look out of place with your theme and colour scheme, it could look awesome with these replaced. I notice a ship on the top right, and as your favicon, would that not make a great forum read/unread icon? Second, as you have fixed width (which I am a big fan of BTW!), the header looks a little odd sitting on a slightly wider forum body with curved corners. Personally, I would reduce the forum width to exactly match the header width and then remove the curved corners, so it all sits flush and in line right down the whole left/right edges.

In the forum itself, I see you have HUGE avatars - not seen this before on a Xenforo site - whilst it's not my cup of tea, it's really good to see what it looks like, and in your theme it works well (because your members have some nice avatars). Some of the threads, with these huge avatars, some seriously over-sized member signatures, and your nice headers, are real eye candy :) So overall well done, a great looking site!

I've tried adding the ship as the read/unread, it doesn't really suite. But I'll look into the matter to make it more suitable for the theme. The fixed with issue, I just noticed after you told me that indeed there is an extra 10 pixels on the fixed width, I've reduced that. I've reduced it to exactly match the header but I have no idea how to remove the curved corners, can you please tell me? XD Thanks for the input :)

The avatar on posts (m) is 150x150, and we allow a max of 150x350 on profile pages (http://orojackson.com/members/freeze.3/), we wanted 150x300 even on posts but it didn't turn out well :P so we decided to go with 150x150 ^^ And yea since its a fansite members tend to use avatars (200x200+) of characters or avatars they made themselves, we even have a graphics sub forum where members may request one if they need an avatar.

Thanks :)
 
I have no idea how to remove the curved corners, can you please tell me? XD Thanks for the input :)

Appearance / Style Properties / Header and navigation / Navigation tabs container

Under "border" clear anything in the "radius" fields. This will remove the corner curves and make the nav bar go flush with your header.
 
Appearance / Style Properties / Header and navigation / Navigation tabs container

Under "border" clear anything in the "radius" fields. This will remove the corner curves and make the nav bar go flush with your header.
Thanks :) It's done! We're working on the forum markers :P
 
Just wanted to bump the thread, we launched a new theme today (it's just the second theme but we improved and learnt more. So the coming themes will keep getting better :D )

http://orojackson.com/

Suggestions are welcome :) The theme's name is Massacre Soldier.
 
Like your colors and layouts, the one thing I'd do is slow down the speed of the notices scrolling. It goes by so fast I can't even read them.

Other than that, best of luck.
 
I like the colors—they're different; not many forums have a sandy color scheme. Though I can understand why some people don't like it. It might be because there isn't a lot of contrast between backgrounds and links. I don't know if you have older members but that might be a problem for them. If you want to keep the current color scheme I suggest you make the link colors a darker gold so that there's more contrast.
 
Wanted to update everyone on what's going on with my XF community.

We launched on August 20th, 2011, going to complete a year this august 20. We currently have 181 members and 25,252 posts.

Since our launch, we have been getting a lot of love from google. The news content on our site ranks mostly on the first page (the big news topics). We've been getting a lot of visits thanks to google :p Here are the analytic's figures since August 20, 2011

demographics.webp

Over the past couple of weeks, we decided to bring some changes to Oro Jackson, since we mainly focus on news and updates (they bring discussion), we opted for a better news/update management system. On Sunday, 6th May our new organized content management goes live officially - http://orojackson.com/content

The styling is done by us, we are also going to design a similar forum theme but that will take a while.

I'm more than happy with XF :p And with the content management update I feel like my site is going a level higher.
 
Hello there :)

I just launched my community yesterday (A fan community for the Japanese series "One Piece"), we were working on it for some time and I thought I'll get opinions on what you have to say about the forum.

It was my first time playing around with the looks aspect of the forum, never before had I done it. So what you see there is a noobs work, but eventually I'll try and improve!

http://orojackson.com

I think the site looks nice, but I would suggest using one of the darker themes as the forum default, I almost went blind when I first went to the forums(happens on xF too). I really like Massacre Soldier better than the current default.
 
I think the site looks nice, but I would suggest using one of the darker themes as the forum default, I almost went blind when I first went to the forums(happens on xF too). I really like Massacre Soldier better than the current default.
We are creating a forum default theme based on the sites theme :P So that will be darkish based.

Thank you :D
 
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