I like the image on the homepage. You should somehow incorporate that design with the forum. I really like the concept of the site as well. Cant wait to see it up and running. I want to try some of your TABS.
That's incorrect, wordpress make a very powerful CMS, see: http://hardon4guitars.com - http://gear-vault.com If you want good search engine results, wordpress is the best. If you want a forum with only couple hundred visitors a day, then you are on the right track. When you're ready for high volume traffic, you'll realize that content is king which requires a stable CMS. Joomla is good, but I cannot stress enough how much Google loves wordpress. It's magical. I cannot think of any guitar forums that does not have a CMS for content. Ultimate-Guitar and Harmony-Central both have a CMS... why reinvent the wheel? I use to think like the OP- After I ventured out of the 'simple forum realms' and started building the wordpress CMS, I realized "wow, if I'd done this sooner, I would had saved a lot of time, work and energy to have over 200% more visits" I got sick of only getting to the 200 visits a day after a year of arse-bustin work. Since Wordpress... well lets say I'm not only getting 200% more traffic, but I'm making a killing from adsense clicks. Do a dnscoop.com on my site gear-vault.com check out all the backlinks, over 100,000! Being featured on roadrunner records, blabbermouth, and other corporate websites sure does pay off (10,000+ visitors in traffic boosts). Can a forum do that on it's own? Maybe after $500,000,000,000,000 in advertisements and years of stress and hard work... why go through all that when Wordpress and joomla both are 100% free Anyhow, I won't go on stressing all my failures and successes. l had to learn the hard and expensive way my self. Good Luck-