Forum renovation

[doli]

Hi all, it's my first post here
After 3 years, I decided to make some major changes to my poker forum.
I have few questions about my forum renovation, and how should I do it.

First thing what I want to do is basically move my phpbb forum to vbulletin, redesign it and add some hack to create articles or some reviews pages.

Now my questions .

1. Do you think I should hire one person for whole design, or maybe run the contest for logo and header and then hire person to create a design using logo/header? Or ... maybe other way, someone will create a full design and then I'll run a logo/header contest? or maybe logo and header contest should be separeted?

2. Banners issue - I'm going to put few banners at the forum , what in your opinion are good places to put banners and how many of them should be accepted by users?
For now I'm thinking about 728x90 banner a little below header, 3 smaller banners like here at webdesigntalk at the bottom, and maybe one 148x60 banner somewhere below posts.
I dont want to put a lot of banners cause I know how annoyin they are, but in the other hand, I want to earn some money from my site , so I'm looking for good compromise. (btw. what do you think about adv after first post for guestes?)

3. designer/coder problem. Do you think I should looking for someone who will do both designing and coding vbulletin skin, or I'll get better result when this job will be done buy 2 different people?

for sure I'll have more question, but these are botherin me now

cheers,
Doli

 

[JYM]

Well, I would find a free/paid vbulletin theme, then host a custom logo design contest and get them to match the colors with the theme.

As for the banner, I think you should have a 480 x 60 embedded into your header (the way it is here on NamePros). If you have one under the header... it makes the users have to scroll down to see more content.