I'm reminded of the story about the three blind men and the elephant.
The colour schemes really don't bother me one way or the other, but I REALLY hate it when a Website backs HTML into a corner. People often seem to want things to look like a printed page, for example like something you'd find in a Sunday magazine. It just doesn't work on a computer display. You wind up both with half the screen wasted and half the content obscured at the same time. The old version of the site is in my view a good example of falling into that trap, and the current version is much better from that point of view.
But ... HTML was designed to let people display information on whatever screen they happen to have on their desk. It has features which are designed to 'render' information in a way which is most suitable for the display(s) of the computer which it is displaying things. Unfortunately since the dotCom revulsion the point seems to have become lost, and scroll bars seem to be the norm rather than the exception. A typical thread page on BCUK uses five or even ten times as much screen real estate as it needs to, with the result that I'm at risk of repetitive strain injury just trying to read posts on the ridiculously long pages. Add to that the inordinately long download times (my browser is currently using 1.3Gigabytes of RAM!!!) and I think the main reason that more people don't just give up with it is that they've never really known anything else.
Don't spend a lot of time trying to make it look nice on your screen, because the odds are that only a small fraction of the people viewing will have a screen just like it. Look at it on a lot of screens. Try using it with a touchpad instead of a mouse. Try using it on an old, slow laptop.
Try to make it convenient for people to read things.
Try to make it LOAD FASTER.
