Hi John,
First off i have to say thank you very much for taking the time to respond! This is exactly the feedback we were looking for and i can only hope that other members of the site will respond with as detailed and constructive critiszm that you have!

I agree with you on all the points you mentioned and i without resorting to excuses, i spose an explanation is in order. JoomlaTips.com was concept that we had been toying with for quite some time. Being active users on the Joomla.org forums, i thought it would be great to have a central place for members (both new and seasoned) to have a "central repository" to share their collective knowledge on Joomla. The overall design was something what of a playground for having a "vibrant" colorful community driven site. I spose its pretty aparent that we love using colors and i have to say that the feedback we received has been well worth the effort. That being said, there are issues we are aware of, such as usability that still need to be addressed. This i spose is the main reason why we sent the email out to all our members using the site.

With v2 of the site we are rethinking our entire strategy to work towards a much simpler interface (or plainly put "facelift") for the site. Another point to mention is, that though we are seasoned to design principles and over all development, running a community driven site is still pretty new to us - so version one overall was purely a way for us to get a feeling of what works and what doesnt. I spose that any community site goes through certain levels of evolution and i dont see us as being any different.

Fixed vs fluid is an age old debate and i think the reason why version 1 was fixed was purely trial and error. One has alot more flexibility with a fixed width design, but again that comes at a certain cost. All of these points have been noted and will be applied in the new version.

The other point to mention is though the best of intentions with the site, we have been totally swamped with some really big joomla projects, which has put a certain level of constraint on how much time we can put into developing JoomlaTips further. Rest assured though, we have done a bit of restructuring in our company and have managed to find a way to prioritize making time to develop the site even further.

As for features, there are already a number of Joomla firsts in the works, which we are really excited about, but it would still be really good to get some additional feedback from our members, as to what else could be added to make the site even better!

Thanks again for your comments and we look forward applying these into the new site :0)

Cheers,
Chris