This topic is more or less about personal style. I've seen very ugly forums be successful and very beautiful forums be successful so it's a toss up.

But personally I think a nice asthetic site is always good, you want to stand out from the rest of the pack. You can usually get a good design around $300 but you can pay less to for lower quality and even higher to get a better quality.

In the end it's the face of your site so don't skinny on areas that need attention.

hm. for this site?
I think this site has a perfect skin, its not to Bright, not to dark in certain areas, it flows together nicely. The different tables and boxes are easily distinguishable.
I agee, everyone has their own "touch" and look. I think if you do bring out a custom skin, maybe some flash in it?

No not for this forum, this skin is very nice!

Just asking the question in general

oh, hm. I'd say it depends on what the fourm is for, Rather its a Business support forum, Graphic forum, Gaming. I think a custom job would add more "Character" to a certain forum ya know. While others have a more Professional sound look.

There are so many skins released you can get a (unique) skin. I visited today www.vbdemo.com and found that they had some nice skins I never saw before. Also modding a free skin gives your forum a prof. look

I would like to see a really good tutorial on modding skins. Most just say take the default skin and play about with it!!! But a really good Tutorial would be good.I have tried in the past and always end up with horrible colors that dont seem to match or tables all over the place ....

I've seen a forum with 70k+ member still using the default vB style, so a custom style certainly isn't required. Ofcourse, if you're running a site about template modding you'll have to impress the member with a good skin .

The key when modifying skins is to keep the templates as intact as possible. First play around with the colours and everything, once thats done you can start fiddling with the structure itself ;).

I agree! as I said, I Like doing Graphics, only thing I lack about making a skin is the "how to". I got a skin, and then changed the images, but I wanna creat my own from scratch, well almost scratch. lol. I'm workin on a web layout for my Videos I've made, that i'm 2 months behind on. Haven't gotten around to it again.

Heh, creating a skin from scratch is not advisable. Simply use the default vB skin and start fiddling with some of the settings.

As I said before: CSS can get you very far.

No doubt, I need to get another skin and start messing with it.