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It looks very professional and clear. The layout is really nice, balanced, and it seems that it can have a lot of content without getting cluttered.
The forum looks a little bit like bbpress? Did you use it? I'm now building a forum based on it and I really like the idea ;)
Do you use the same font everywhere? I would maybe try to diversify it a little, maybe you have some areas where you can use image titles?
Sometimes the text looks a little bit too linear. I would try to find ways to use icons instead of some text links, or narrower columns, or anything that would make the long lines of text shorter. Long lines are hard to read even on paper, and on the screen it's even harder.
Sometimes the very dark grey background looks too overwhelming. It's nice, and elegant, but maybe only buttons should be "that dark", and the colour behind them - a little lighter?
On the demo site - I see that not only text lines are too wide, but you also have many menu bars which take full width of the screen, and browser screens in the header, which have long wide bars... this is too monotonous, some of them need to be shorter ;)
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Ania commented:Here the lines are too long for me:
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_DCdlvFF6Ij4/S1IElnk3pKI/AAAAAAAABPY/xZ2GMexvw2s/toolong.jpg
you could count how many words they contain and how does it relate to some typography rules (on the screen or in print). About adding another font - there was a nice article on Smashing Magazine about font stacks, you can find some ideas which fonts match. They probably also had one on using title fonts with various content fonts.
Thanks for info about TurboGears, I didn't know it! By now I only used Wordpress.
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Stuart Bowness commented:
Super helpful. I'll check out smashing magazine.
On the line lengths I'm not sure how I can reduce the length without making the sidebar massive. Most blogs these days have a similar format in terms of line-length... but perhaps it could come in quite a bit in terms of padding.
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Ania commented:
Yes, you can add more padding to make them shorter without changing layout...
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Yes, BBpress was used in the forums. We had to spend quite a bit of time skinning it so that it would fit the look/feel of the site. WordPress is used on the blogs, and then the rest of the site is powered by TurboGears.
Yes, Helvetica is used in the body and in the titles. I've definitely contemplated mixing the typography around, but I haven't found the perfect font quite yet for headings.
Can you describe where you think text looks too linear?