Our Website Design is Terrible

Instead, I would like to engage the community: what are your suggestions for the design of our website? This could be in the form of a page mockup, a CSS stylesheet that would work with it, or even just constructive text suggestions.

I suppose I'll get nowhere with this, but I like old-school. I actually prefer the threaded nature of the old Usenet based on NNTP protocol, but if it's gonna be web forums, this is the style I like.

Another site I frequent -- SitePoint -- revamped the look of its forums from traditional (like this) to modern (like this: community.sitepoint.com/) and while they may look cooler, I don't think they improve usability or the user experience.

We need to move away from the EllisLab style - that is one of my concerns. It is not our place to usurp their style, or to pretend to be the same.

This forum's style is pretty much the MyBB default, and it is only a starting point. I am hoping that the community will step up to come up with a theme that will make the forum easier to use, or more "with it", even if at the expense of the "old school" that you like! Our main website, at the moment, is pretty much the default Bootstrap 2 format, as many are not hesitant to point out!

I have already had a number of private suggestions for the style of our main site, down to the point of stylesheets and even a CodeIgniter webapp to do it

I think that our own unique style, old-school or not, would be a reasonable target for the main website, the forum, and even the user guide
Think of this as an exercise in coming up with an "identity" or "brand".
Hmmm!