Yes, I'd criticise their huge sponsor ad as well, but you're scrambling the points being made. Look at the features, implementation, design and layout of the rest, basically everything but the one point, a banner ad, you've got caught up on. It's excellent right down to the quality of the icons. It's no good bashing one piece of software against the next, that doesn't interest me, like fights over PCs and Macs, Linux and NT. Where your loyalty lies is irrelevant to the points being made, and not a good thing either if they interfere with a genuine point at the expense of improving the software. I'm looking for great design, even a little flair, and I don't see if in GForum currently. Great software yes, I use GMail and GForum myself, but having worked in the games industry, editorial illustration and site design for many years, I think I can spot a great site over a not so great site if I see one, even if it is just my opinion.


Having already buttoned down the backend system, if you could pay a great designer a few hundred dollars to create a fantastic, eye catching design, that would inevitably *improve* sales (I cannot help but think here of the templates that used to bundle with GMail), would you do it? It seems to me you're more hung up on the idea that I even dared criticise the templates, than what the benefits of a makeover could do for the templates and therefore GT as a company. You see, I'm not *criticising GT*, just those damn templates. They're not good enough! Arguments like "you can't expect" strike my as myopic, baseless and at worse damaging for the company. You can either do yourself favours or not, or maybe not even recognise an area to be improved when you see one, which seems to be your argument.

Googles of fantastic templates? One would be enough.

Jason