What do you think of the new design?

love the new forum, tom l is a genius.

Great job tom, get my brother Hans out of the 80s and 90s!

The speedclimb.com logo needs an update.
The color scheme is brighter but I think it may incorporate too many colors.
In the end it's best to have a coordinated look/feel with the main web site.

It is much better however there is major uncluttering on the home page that needs to be done.

btw, good job on the forum!

I hope my response wasn't taken harshly.
It would look good if the speedclimb logo was replaced with the golite6.jpg resized, using blue as a background instead of orange (still with gradient).
I'd use that same blue in the background of the home page, use a large version of the golite with a newer navigation component and have less links per page.
I hope this sounds better.....

Hakuna ma tata ( no worries be happy in Swahili)

Thanks for the comments Mdavid, just busy with travel and many life things. we really want to update the whole website, it's just that other life items are taking up the time.

Hans

Not in the least - appreciate the fact that you took the time to comment. It will take a while to get all of the content from the old site formatted for the new design. Chip away, bit by bit. Once it gets transferred over, then we might think about the logo and such.

cool, after making the comments about manipulating the user interface is occured to me that some of the changes may be difficult as you'd be customizing a layout or some proprietary configuration file.
I decided to set up a forum for my family and play with customizations and found these forums are so darn easy to get going, just mysql and perl and done.
Mock Up

I figured I'd at least mock up the type of color scheme I was talking about instead of just spray about what'd be cool....

oh, how come you don't allow img links in the forum, it allows pictures but without taxing your bandwidth as everything comes from photobucket or wherever!

Yeah, we'll see WTR to orange or some other color. The thing about the design you have in your mock-up is that it is rather low contrast. That means that with some setups, depending on the system and the gamma, people may not be able to read your text. Regardless of the setup, people with visual impairments (color blind, elderly and losing contrast vision, etc) may not be able to read that text. The FAQ, Search and other text in that range should be lightened up a fair bit. Anyway, I thought I'd start orange, because it's Hans after all. Can't be giving him some subdued color scheme. Hans needs a color scream.

We'll probably also want to switch to a fixed-width layout b/c those of us who have gone to extra large LCD monitors find it hard to read full-width sites... sigh Back to reformatting the speed records for the new template!

I agree, mostly I just posted the mock up because I dislike complainers who don't actually do anything.
We used to go back and forth regarding fixed or percentage widths at work and now always go for a specific number of pixels. A huge benefit is during the communication with customers who want it to look exactly a certain way....that's really difficult if you have tables and graphics changing locations and then have to deal with a bunch of banking vp's.

How about linking in images from photobucket?