to be, or not to be: which layout should I use?

Personally, I think I prefer either BF or SMOOTH the best.

Welcome to TWF Adam,

I prefer GUI or BF, but they are all very nice looking in general.

Hmmm.... I can't decide which is best. They all look good. I've narrowed it down to bf, smooth, and gui but can't decide between them! I'm leaning towards bf right now. It's not as graphically impressive as the others but for some reason it's standing out more to me - could be the colour contrast.

(p.s. up the font size on your navbar just a bit)

I don't care for the first one or xproject much - I think it is the lack of header graphics.

That leaves me with bf, smooth, and gui also.

The problem I have with smooth and gui is that the rounded outer lines kind of clash with the cornerd inner lines. In fact, it bugs me more on smooth - closing THAT window.

Ok, 1 - bf, 2 - gui. Both could use a slightly larger logo/better branding though.

my pick would be smooth, but do the rev counter in red and green (show the red line) and maybe use a clolored car top right just to highlight it a bit

I can't use bf. It looks to close like its model, bikeforums.net. The only problem w/ making the tachometer red + green is that it isn't really a tachometer, so it wouldn't work. It was on a black background, so I had to invert the colors and "multiply" the layer onto the other layer to make the white disappear cleanly and smoothly.

Also, these are made to run best at 800x600

gui

dragonsjaw

I guess I will be the odd ball here.

I like XProject but....
:light: think you should add the logo, ">> Supercarstats.com - The Supercar Resource" to the image of the car....maybe over to the right of it.

thanx for all your opinions. I have decided to do bF but change it so it looks more unique...

this is the result, is it ok? or is it still to close to bikeforums.net?

http://www.supercarstats.com/v6-0

its kind of, not really, a little like but totally different.
confused? umm ok, it has the bike forums feel but the bike forums is just that - forums, you've got content that kind of breaks that shape.
If you lost the grey table around the content it would further it from the bike forums.

Can't really compare the content areas much. The structure is too different. The only thing that struck me was the similarity of the blue/yellow in the header areas. When I scrolled down your page, it looked unique and lost most of the likeness to the bikeforums.

Maybe you could lighten up the blue, or add some sort of gradient or pattern, or even just make the background image more obvious. How about losing the white for "Supercarstats" to chrome/silver?
Try out different ideas... even those that seem absolutely outrageous -- they often work out well.

hmmm... thanx... I tried a dark grey, but that blended in too well.. so I did a light grey... better?

I think my design is finally ready

after my dns change users will see a new supercarstats.com