Looking for forum ideas..

Not sure where to put this so...sorry if it's in the wrong place.

After a few months of putting it off I finally decided to develop http://www.talkstandards.com , I'm trying to make a skin right now and I am having a bit of trouble.

I have already started working on cleaning up vBulletin's default skin codewise (seperating structure and content as much as possible) but visually I want something that when you look at it you can tell what the site is about.

For example some sites I go to I can already tell its a CSS based layout, it just has that "feel", I'm not sure if anyone else experiences that but thats what I'm going for.

The reason I am developing this site is standards is a much debated topic, over and over again. There aren't too many forums dedicated to web standards so I decided why not make one. Now it would be kind of wack if the forum is on web standards and the skin is nowhere near compliant, at least in my opinion.

The layout will be fluid with a left column, header and footer. I will use tables for the forum section but the rest will be tableless. I will also take out any inline styling keeping the layout as structural as possible. I also believe this will save quite a bit of bandwidth and make it a very fast loading forum.

So after all my rambling if anyone could help me out with some ideas for the skin, or for any part of the forum that would be great!

Thanks!