I worked very hard on this.

HOME
-Main blog posts and discussions
-The "read more" link will connect to the corresponding thread in the forum

FORUM
-An extension of what we have now
-Includes the following:

(Moderation: Accessible to staff only)

Community:
-Introduce yourself
-Site News
-Feedback
-Studio

Gaming:
-NINTENDO NX
-Reviews
-Tech Help
-other subsections will be added as need

Lounge:
-for all off-topic discussion

REVIEWS:
-links to review section on forum
-rating for each game included with thread title
-include organization method to easily find reviews

CALENDAR:
-includes release dates and other important gaming events

MEMBERS
-just what it says. lists of members incl. staff

FAQ
-basic how to use the site w/ rules

SEARCH
-search

User CP is accessible by clicking the username in the upper right. Also includes notification indicator.

If site gains enough traffic, a chatbox will be added to the header up top or on the righthand side

Looks good so far, my worry is on the reviews page. Assuming you want all users to be able to make reviews(I think that was what you wanted), it'll need a system to let you search for reviews on just one game

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Always buy the game first to see if you will enjoy the demo.

Good point.

How about a subsection for each game?

The general search up top will be a little more than a box so it would be set up so that it's easy to search in the reviews section only

That could work. Under that setup, I'd probably only have first party/major third party releases have their own section with a general "other" section to avoid sections that only have 1-2 reviews in them. Then if a game gets enough reviews in the "other" category, they can get their own section.

I made a rough "sketch" of how I'd think a review page could work.



Similar to what we have now for our forums, but replace the envelope on the left with an (optional) score. Below the username would be a very brief summary of your review.

It'd look something like this when posting

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Always buy the game first to see if you will enjoy the demo.

I really like the idea of blog posts being linked straight to forum threads. Most sites just have comment sections which aren't really the same.

Would this still be using vBulletin or something else?

To the right of the thread you'll notice a "rating" system intended for "rating a thread" (a useless feature) so we could just change it so that the writer can give the rating in reference to the game.

Probably not VBulletin. Something else entirely. Depends on how it goes.

Sent David some of our notes.

David reccommended using IPS

Since it would do all that we needed to.

But I might look into other options like vBulletin since IPS seems quite expensive.

IPS looks really nice. Have you tried the free demo yet?

I'd donate some money if that's needed. You should ask David what he did for advert space.

I'm trying out the free demo as we speak. I'm liking IPS a lot. A lot more intuitive than vBulletin.

The demo version doesn't have all the features that I'd like to play around with though

And thanks for the offer! I'll handle the costs for now though.