I have one other spin on this - the main reason I am a XOOPS user (not joomla/drupal/owt else) is when I visited this site for the first time I could find everything I needed straight away. Look at Joomla - Where are the manuals? Where are the downloads?

This site does have an overall flow which makes it very quick to get the basic information and then go digging deeper for more. It works. It might not be the prettiest (but the new logo and theme is great) but whatever you do, please don't spoil this usability.

Hope this helps,
Gareth

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The power of CSS Zen Garden isn't only on the quality of the designs, but also in the simple but powerful fact that each and every one of these designs use the same index.html file. The only difference is the CSS file, and it shows how much control you really have over the look and feel of your site by using CSS properly.

Herko

http://www.bbc.co.uk

On the grounds of useability, accessibilty and generally #OOPS# good organisation of a lot of content.

Open to users with disabilities, mobile platforms and multiple languages.

For interested parties, there's a document available detailing the redesign process (8mb PDF):

The Glass Wall - The Homepage Redesign 2002

Obviously this document is 3-4 years old, but still holds some relevancy in this context.

Despite the fact that I really don't like 3 colomn classic themes, I love the graphics at http://www.jadoogaran.org , it's a fully XOOPS generated website that is really cool I think!

That is very impressive... a Harry Potter site I guess?

Yes it's a Harry Potter website!

There's some pretty amazing themes in use, as shown by the great examples posted in this thread :)

Some thoughts came to mind;

1) This is the main XOOPS organization site, the primary. It's look should reflect that. While a lot of the sites posted here have some fantastic visual appeal, if you want a new person to have the first impression that XOOPS is a professionally produced product then the main XOOPS site should convey a professional impression. Get away from 'table borders' and use more white space to separate sections, headers should be very clean and crisp, make more use of different font sizes. Perhaps a top navigation bar for separating major sections so that you are free to use full-width below for sections that deserve more space than a cramped center-column. There's a number of excellent corporate-style themes already contributed here on the site which could be nicely adapted for a custom design. The colours chosen are less important than the style.

2) Since this is the main XOOPS site, it should also be something of a technology demonstrator. It should reflect cutting edge web technology, or at least current state of the art. I know that maximum compatibility is important for the maximum number of users, and maybe that means there should be a theme switch to move between [PLAIN] and [EDGE].

3) I was really impressed by the Zen Garden's examples of what CSS is capable of (thanks Herko!), and I think that this sort of approach could be used to good effect, not just to make the site look better, but as part of the 'technology demonstrator', showing what XOOPS can do with CSS discipline.

4) There's a number of sites that I've admired, but whatever XOOPS uses should be unique to XOOPS. This software isn't like every other package, the site should reflect that uniqueness.

5) The new logo looks great, but using a commercial font forces any graphics designers who want to contribute fully consistant logos or banners either have to purchase the font, or steal it. This seems like an inappropriate position to place people into when all they want to do is contribute their time and talent to a community effort for a free software package. I hope the choice of font is reconsidered.

Just some notions, I hope they're of use.

I have been a fan of CSS Xen Garden for some time now. I also generally try to use a complete CSS dynamic layout for every site I design.

HOWEVER, I've found that with XOOPS one can only go so far with this idea. The core engine, as well as most modules have a table based layout written into them. So to go totally CSS/XHTML (as would be state of the art IMHO) would also mean rewriting many modules. Not an impossible task, but could definitely be labor intensive.

Dotmil, you might be interested in this forum click here

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Great! Thanks!