Well as you can see, we've gone with a brand new look. The old site was heavily html tables dependant, so I searched high and low for CSS skins for the site. Short of a very few areas, the new site is almost 100% CSS thanks to the Stellar IPB skins from James over at Onelotus Creative. When logged in, just look at the top of any page to change between six different colour schemes.

We also went with much larger fonts. I work on dual 22" monitors running 1920x1440 on each, so ALL websites look tiny to me. But reviewing my webstats, I found that the majority of visitors to Belchfire.net run 1024x768. So the new layout was designed to look good and be easily readable at this resolution (and higher), with enough room for a browser sidebar. I hope you enjoy the new look.

Second, we've upgraded the portal, forums and themes gallery to add new functionality and great new features. Just a few of which are:

• Edit your own files
• Email and PM notification when uploaded files are posted
• Add files to your Favorites
• Subscribe to files and get notified of any updates to those files
• New Comments system
• Popular files HOT tag

Not to mention many new features for the forums as well. So hope you enjoy the site and all the new features. I'm hoping that this will attract new artists and encourage folks to upload new work often.

We've also setup page caching, expires headers and zlib compression to all pages and images on the site to improve page load times. With all the banners present though, the benefits of these improvements won't be all that apparent due to the additional latency of pulling in data from three or four external systems.

Members can upgrade to Sponsoring Member status for just $10.00 US for 1 year to have all banners, popups and text ads disabled when logged in. Upgrade via Purchase Paid Subscription in your controls.

Cheers!

Wow dude. What a difference in speed and appearance. Good work!

Cool, thanks man. I'm adding one more skin from the same fellow. Really nice all-blue skin. Stay tuned ;)

I have a tendancy to dislike forum powered sites, but the effort and results from a technical standpoint of the new system is very good, and much faster response than the last version.

The theme I like the best is the perl one, it just matches the site the best I think, though everyone will have their own preference.

I also like the idea that you can make such a small donation and disable ads completely, nice touch for frequent visitors. (although I don't see how financially it would pay the bills so to speak, it's nice to have the option to remove the ads from a user standpoint)

I do agree in a way that the old site was easier to navigate, but alot of that I am pretty sure comes down to becoming familiar with the new setup. The site is very easy on the eyes and should seem very simple for a newcomer.

Overall, great job Hamesh.

Thanks man, good feedback. I've got two more site skins in the works that should be live by the weekend. For those that liked the old site (v2, not v1), and are running low resolutions or prefer small fonts, I think you'll like them. Stay tuned :)

One of two new skins is now live. LCW Floralies is now the default. Trying to mimic the old v2.0 skin everyone seemed to like. It's pretty close I think. Hope you like it!

The LCW skin mimics the old style pretty closely, but I still prefer the perl one, will try browsing around in LCW for a bit and see if I change my mind. Good job.