I was given a assignment to help the fleet advance and redevelop the web site. my background

Web site manager
ASM programmer
SQL Programmer
IT Project Manager (CCNE,MSP,MSCE)

First part of the project set goals and determine benchmarks.

What I see the goals to be.
1. Develop a team of developers what do we need?
PHP/ASP programmers(see future projects)
Graphic Designer
Web Designer
Flash programmer would be nice

2. New forums in place. This should be our highest priority. Why? simply when you switch forums its very difficult if not impossible to securely transfer the old post.

3. Complete site redesign. To the leadership i am thinking LCARS design.

4. Setup a forum admin team as we become more popular we will be hit by spammers.

Future Project

I would like to either modify a current Raid(wow,GW, or War) sign up system or design a new one for future fleet raids.

This is my intial post more to come in the following days.

Wowadict

If you need anything from me just e-mail me or have Gundancer give you my cell number

Why not just upgrade the phpBB forums you have in place and redo the CSS? That's not hard, or even all that time consuming. If it were me doing it, I'd just take one of the defaults and modify it to something that matched the basic idea here, without changing much else. I'd offer to do it myself, but I'm pretty new to the alliance and the game, and I'm not sure I'd trust me. (I've gotten pretty cynical about people after nearly 20 years of playing MMOs. I understand paranoia.)

Anyway, just a thought, and maybe not a good one. I'd offer to cut you a new layout as well, but the same misgivings I'm sure apply.

As another attempt at being constructive, it appears you are using Joomla! as your CMS. I know that Joomla! has more features than WordPress, but for what you are actually doing here, do you need them? Once you tie WordPress to phpBB together, what's the issue? You state that you want to tie your raid sign-up db to PHP, and that it is presumably running on an MS SQL server, probably with an ASP component for sign-ups.. there's PHP projects out there that do that, some of which are simply plugins or addons to WordPress, so I'm not sure I see the issue. I've always felt it was better to pick a language and stick with it as much as possible.. if it's not possible, fine, but otherwise you're likely to make a mess.

I saw you have Microsoft credentials. If that's the case why not do the whole thing in ASP.NET? Plenty of good templates out there and ready made stuff to use on Codeplex.

Anyway, these are mostly rhetorical questions, not something you need to provide answers for to me or anyone else. I just thought you might want to hear what someone new to the website (who has a serious background in similar fields) thought. I certainly don't mean to put you on the spot. I'm just trying to be helpful.