The Ark is one of Sweden's most famous rock bands at the moment, and I've had the fortune to work at their forum. When I took over, the forum was suffering terribly from spam, and it was still stuck at a 3.3.03
No MODs or customizations had been done what so ever.
basically, it looked like this
[IMG]http://i36.tinypic.com/2gy7ww0.png[/IMG]
What I wanted to do was not only to bring it up to date, but also to make it feel like it was truly a part of the rest of their website. I was rather experienced with HTML and CSS, but had never ever touched anything that had anything to do with databases before, so it was a true challenge. It was all trial and error, and these forums have been a great help!
this is what it looks like today
[IMG]http://i37.tinypic.com/2kg41l.png[/IMG] http://thearkworld.com/forum/default.asp

user/password is demo/demo is you wanna have a look.
For comparison, this is what the main site looks like
http://thearkworld.com/main.asp<