It IS a great looking tour, but by reading the thread before clicking, I assumed you were talking about a tour style similar to http://www.suicidegirls.com I've been raving about that kind of "truely transparent" tour forever now, but it's not heard of in adult gay sites. Most people say something like that is just too busy, gives the surfer too much credit, and just wouldn't work. I strongly disagree, but oh well.

As far as that tour, it's really nice, but I was dissapointed that they used sepia tones but went with jpg over gif. you can create an awesome colorized look for a "glossy" tour, like this one, using any base color, and that allows you to go with gif over jpg, and save a bunch of loadtime and bandwidth usage. I don't get some designers, they seem to be oblivious to the dialup user percentage and bandwidth usage.

I don't care for the "boxy" tours anymore at all, they just can't show what kind of work the site owners have put into presenting their content in a quality manor, inside the members area. People keep saying it's all about the rebills...maybe a different type of member goes for sites like suicidegirls, but I bet they are also the type who are likely to remain loyal rebillers, instead of joining, downloading all the content, then cancelling.

Surely there is a lesson to be learned from that? I have to be really into something to put tons of work into it, and I can't bring myself to put tons of work into promoting these affiliate programs that keep popping up with dozens of glossy sites, with limited, questionable, sometimes even mirrored content. The mentality seems to be "gather up a bunch of content in a niche, but it behind a glossy tour you bought from a designer, hope you can find enough content that fits to update once in a while, move onto the next niche" How is that fun for anyone?

I really miss the days of it being easy to find sites made by people who were really into their site, and it's content. Now it seems like the majority of webmasters can't see that their glossy sites are boring, maybe it's the huge $ signs blocking their eyes.