KCRag Forum

I am not a filthy creative, and even I can see that the forum needs a facelift. It's just been upgraded to new and better hosting, so to match that, I think it'd make sense to give it a new look. I was talking with mean earlier today, and we were excitedly talking about the future of the forum, and agreed that part of that needs to be a new appearance. Pursuant to that, we also agreed that neither of us is qualified for the facilitation of that appearance.

With that in mind, we're looking for one or more graphic designers who can spruce the phpbb theme up a bit. People with an eye for design. As for compensation, we can discuss it, but realize that nobody does anything on this site for a living. Mean and I take time out of our days to work on this for no more payment than the satisfaction of seeing it work, and the occasional highly appreciated words of praise. There are no ads, nor will there ever be.

It's that kind of mindset that we're looking for in graphic design help.

Just to chime in with my $0.02, I would really like to see something KC-centric, either as a header image or... something. If someone could hit the board index and think, "Oh this site is about KC!" without, you know, cheating by reading the forum titles, that'd be awesome. What most people who visit this forum see is the default phpbb theme. That's a damn shame, imo.

Of course many of you will remember a time I put together a new theme, and while I still like the concept of the theme I came up with (streetcar header, etc), the practicality / usability proved to be sorely lacking, because I'm not a web designer and I inexplicably love constraining things to unreasonably narrow margins.

you say no ads, but you could do curated sponsorships instead
the idea is one entity buys an exclusive block of time and their name goes in a key spot that everyone can see on every page. you promote them on twitter as well.

"The KC Rag, sponsored by MainCor"
"The KC Rag, sponsored by The ___ Merchants Association"
"The KC Rag, sponsored by Jimmy John's"

this site does it on a bigger scale: http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
there's a history podcast that works well this same way. they do 1-2 ads during a 30 minute audio show.

the idea isn't to turn a profit but cover some expenses. the site is full of educated, employed, passionate people.

KCRag, sponsored by Sprawl. Sprawl: You Want It, We Got It.TM

Is something mobile friendly possible? This site is murder on a 2x3.5 screen.

Something old-timey? A brick veneer and maybe some faux iron columns?

Eon Blue wrote:Something old-timey? A brick veneer and maybe some faux iron columns?

Something quintessentially kansas city: cracked asphalt with faded parking stripes.

Am more interested in function than form/appearance. Would rather see the mobile version come back but with ability to 'view new posts'. I ended up not using the mobile version in past because you couldn't view new posts but it was a better format for mobile devices.

To be serious, I like the idea. For a banner image, I'd like to see something representative of the city, but not necessarily the ubiquitous view from the Liberty Memorial. I'm always intrigued by an elevation view of the city from the far east or west showing Downtown to Crown Center to Midtown to the Plaza.

Unfortunately, I am also not one of the creative types.

earthling wrote:Am more interested in function than form/appearance. Would rather see the mobile version come back but with ability to 'view new posts'. I ended up not using the mobile version in past because you couldn't view new posts but it was a better format for mobile devices.

Navigating to View Unread Posts and bookmarking that is my workaround for that on my phone.

^I do that too, however it's in desktop mode. There used to be a mobile mode with better mobile format but didn't have view unread posts option.

chaglang wrote:Is something mobile friendly possible? This site is murder on a 2x3.5 screen.

I agree, and we tried the phpBB official mobile theme thing, but as we learned, it kinda stinks (mainly thanks to no unread posts feature, but it lacked elsewhere too, iirc). This is one of the ongoing niggling little issues I hope we can get resolved sooner rather than later, but as far as I can tell there's no good official mobile solution yet. This issue has been argued about on the phpBB dev forums for years, and the approach taken by phpBB developers is basically, "Yeah, that sucks. If you want to fix it, go for it and we might include it in the official release!"

Considering most spend majority of time on mobile, is odd they wouldn't focus on mobile features and format.

I completely agree, but for whatever reason the developers don't appear to be concerned about mobile. This fact alone has caused me to ponder whether we might need to think about switching again, but it's such a huge pain in the ass...

For me, I often check the forum at the office, with many eyes in the area. It is nice that the forum currently is graphically flat and lean on color so the bosses don't notice I am on the web as easily. If this forum looked more snazzy and eye catching, I would check in far less during the work day because my computer screen would catch the eyes of the nannies here. I am probably not the only one this would effect.
I rarely check the forum out of the office because the mobile problems mentioned above.

And it is for that reason that once logged in, you can set the theme to whatever you want.

bahua wrote:And it is for that reason that once logged in, you can set the theme to whatever you want.

Hmm......news to me. I assumed "it is what it is". Maybe someday I will figure out how to do that....but probably not.

Hint: it's in the User Control Panel.

flyingember wrote:you say no ads, but you could do curated sponsorships instead
the idea is one entity buys an exclusive block of time and their name goes in a key spot that everyone can see on every page. you promote them on twitter as well.

"The KC Rag, sponsored by MainCor"
"The KC Rag, sponsored by The ___ Merchants Association"
"The KC Rag, sponsored by Jimmy John's"

this site does it on a bigger scale: http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
there's a history podcast that works well this same way. they do 1-2 ads during a 30 minute audio show.

the idea isn't to turn a profit but cover some expenses. the site is full of educated, employed, passionate people.

Obviously, we're sponsored by Ross Dress 4 Less.

...and Bob's Streetcar Emporium.