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Captive Reefs
CaptiveReefs is a website for coral loving people, with an owner who is an extreme coral lover himself. After all the vBulletin Skinning and vBulletin Mods we made for CaptiveReefs, Jim (the owner) even started getting inspired to customize his website himself. We check up on him all the time to make sure he hasn't broken anything of course!
- Homepage
- Forumhome Page - Columnized Structure with Individual Icons
- Forum Display - Categorized, Stylized, vBulletinized!
The Overall Mission
The new "Web 2.0" standards and need for cleanliness and order in the messiness of the world-wide-web made it hard to get a website so heavily jam-packed with images and members show eager to show them off, rather hard to transition from something that looked overwhelming, to something that took you for a nice swim in the ocean.
vBulletin Modifications & Customization
Custom Widgets & Pages We Made
Smart Tabs
Not only do these tabs make it very easy to navigate, but in each tab we've included widgets that automatically pull data from different sections of the forum. Making it so that the content is constantly being updated and refreshed, and making the user's browsing experience that much more simple and worth-while.
Content Slider
Using a sleek jquery slideshow, we created a widget that pulls topics & attachments from specified forums.
Homepage (Fully-Automated)
Aside from the Homepage Slider, the homepage shows Featured & Recent Topics, along with news from the website's Sponsors, where the admin can specify where to pull sponsor news via their own Admin Control Panel.
Check this out!
The best part about working with CaptiveReefs was watching how much their owner learned simply by working with us. Before we knew it, simply by chatting with us and asking questions, he was making customizations of his own. Infact, using nothing more than our Advanced Forums and Extra Threadfields products, he was able to made a "Fish Finder" forum and Sales & Trade forum. Keep in mind, he made these pages with absolutely no programming experience!
The vBulletin Designing Process
The main tackle was definitely staying "Web 2.0" while not looking tacky with all these pictures of reefs. Not to mention it's hard to control what quality images members contribute, and we didn't want to take away from their exposure by excluding them from the homepage or top tabs, so we had to suite everything up just perfect enough so as not to let any one element take away from another in terms of quality. We used a lot of tabs and columns where possible to keep as much info as possible without having to have such a long page.
We knew we wanted something blue, we knew we wanted them to feel as through they were in the reef as they typed, and we knew we had a challenge ahead of us!
A few glimpses of Some Cool Pages
The new "Web 2.0" standards and need for cleanliness and order in the messiness of the world-wide-web made it hard to get a website so heavily jam-packed with images and members show eager to show them off, rather hard to transition from something that looked overwhelming, to something that took you for a nice swim in the ocean.
vBulletin Modifications & Customization
Custom Widgets & Pages We Made
Smart Tabs
Not only do these tabs make it very easy to navigate, but in each tab we've included widgets that automatically pull data from different sections of the forum. Making it so that the content is constantly being updated and refreshed, and making the user's browsing experience that much more simple and worth-while.
Content Slider
Using a sleek jquery slideshow, we created a widget that pulls topics & attachments from specified forums.
Homepage (Fully-Automated)
Aside from the Homepage Slider, the homepage shows Featured & Recent Topics, along with news from the website's Sponsors, where the admin can specify where to pull sponsor news via their own Admin Control Panel.
Check this out!
The best part about working with CaptiveReefs was watching how much their owner learned simply by working with us. Before we knew it, simply by chatting with us and asking questions, he was making customizations of his own. Infact, using nothing more than our Advanced Forums and Extra Threadfields products, he was able to made a "Fish Finder" forum and Sales & Trade forum. Keep in mind, he made these pages with absolutely no programming experience!
The vBulletin Designing Process
The main tackle was definitely staying "Web 2.0" while not looking tacky with all these pictures of reefs. Not to mention it's hard to control what quality images members contribute, and we didn't want to take away from their exposure by excluding them from the homepage or top tabs, so we had to suite everything up just perfect enough so as not to let any one element take away from another in terms of quality. We used a lot of tabs and columns where possible to keep as much info as possible without having to have such a long page.
We knew we wanted something blue, we knew we wanted them to feel as through they were in the reef as they typed, and we knew we had a challenge ahead of us!
A few glimpses of Some Cool Pages
