Design and such : How important is the visual aspects of your site?

It has happened to even the best of us: you've registered for a forum that lacked the finess visually to match the wealth of information it provides. When managing your own forum, how much preplan work do you incorporate to the visuals aspects such as theme colors? Do you hire a graphic designer to adhere to the general " style " your trying to achieve with the forum or do you utilize the graphics provided by the forum theme? This may seem like a somewhat trivial question but I find myself marred with color selections, designs and functions.

Do you simply concentrate the colors and themes based on a suggested logo?

or

Do you simply choose two colors and allow the two colors to translate into something more as you build the forum?

or

Do you simply feel the color scheme and visual aspects can be improved at a later date as your progress?

 

Keep it simple. Heavy themes can become hard on your server resources and your member's eyes.
Quality banner and logo are all you really need.
Maybe custom forum icons.
White is still the most widely used background for a reason.

 

Our forum theme was designed mostly by a mate of mine, though I need a lot of tweaking, customization and nit-picking.

I wanted to go for a color scheme which was a mixture of light and dark colors, so I went with light grey and dark blue. I'm hoping things will look more appealing after we've worked out all the kinks, and I plan on doing multiple themes with different color schemes. I also need to get a banner sorted.

For me visuals play a semi-important part. The community and quality of the forum come first though.

 

Design is fairly important, at least in that people don't like sites with an eye hurting design that's difficult to navigate, takes forever to load or is broken to hell (think vB 5 at the moment).

But it's not exactly the most important thing ever. Indeed, quite a lot of rather large forums haven't even really bothered to modify the style much from the default, so a poorly customised site is hardly a instant failure condition.

 

I think design is some what important, people want to see a visually neat forum and be able to navigate it without lag. Lots of colors and different coding can cause the lag on the server and thus making the users lag and time out and have a lot of errors, however theme is good to have but so is presentation. If my forum was presented right with neat categories and topics to talk about without a ton of child boards however you want to call them, I would like to see more forums that are neat looking and not very cluttered. Then again the whole thing is on the eye of the beholder,you should also have something you're happy with.

 

Err... lots of colours can't cause server lag. Lots of coding/add ons, sure. But colours can't slow down a site by themselves.

 

Depends on the source. CSS won't usually slow a site down. A full 3000 X 3000 pixel 300 DPI PNG background will.

 

That's true. But the last posters comment was kind of ambiguous to say the least...

 

Simple themes are the best i think i don't like one with to much on it a nice steady theme with like a few ads on is quite good it gets to much when you have ads and pictures like everywhere or i hate when the navigation bar has to much on it so its like going off the page.

 

I'm one of those that used to sacrifice speed just to get the hottest website, with loads of graphics, schemes etc. But with time i realised no matter what your website looks like, the speed and the bare minimum, is enough for users. So now i concentrate mostly on colors, few graphics and lots of pictures to attract the lazy readers.