Keeping it simple works for me. Not too many different colours, or too many different fonts and flashing icons. Makes it too 'busy' and people won't want to spend too much time there.

Well, I can see simple to a point - but there should be something attractive enough about it to draw attention.

An attractive Home page, with everything properly laid out, will get the user to look further, then you need interesting content to keep them there.

I have found though that gimmicky links wih lots of animations and flashing buttons and jarring colours annoy me enough to go somewhere else. Not only that but too many of those things make the pages harder to load, and if you are googling through to somewhere and it doesn't load straight away, you just google on to the next without waiting.

One of the worst things to do with a forum is have lots of animated ads running. It makes everything load so slowly that people don't want to come back. The same is true with Kontera or inline test ads. They can slow the load time beyond all reason!

Yes exactly. In this world of instant responses, waiting minutes for all the little flashy icons to load up is a no no.. You lose customers straight away. I for one never have the patience to wait for an animation heavy site to load up when I am searching for something.

Agreed. And I consider myself to be relatively patient, but if graphics seem like they are taking forever to load (anything over a few seconds), I usually move on right away.

So there you go, we've established a pretty basic rule then between us.

Don't overdo the flashy icons and animations if you don't want to lose customers.

I do have to agree with that one, as well. All of that animation would be such a distraction for me, that I probably wouldn't get anything out of the forum.

Funny we are talking about this, I just visited a site that looked really nice, but took forever to load. It had a big flash animation thing that took like a minute to load, I'm surprised I waited that long!

you have the patience of a saint so you have... a whole minute? I would have been long gone!