Importance of page rank? Options

[NovaArgon]

I guess its all in the look of my page. I am really good with Dreamweaver so I can make really cool looking front pages. I don't know jack about php so getting the forums to look cool is imposable unless I find someone willing to do the phpbb style code or whatever.

Is it better to have my forums on the front page www.drysnot.com or is it better to have my forums on a sub level www.drysnot.com/forum

I know that page rank applies to the first page then once the page rank for that page gets high enough the bots dig a little deeper and find the forums but if my front page has very little text and a ton of images that will look cool to a user but be crap for a bot.

Whats better in my case front page or just forums?

Thanks

[pandy]

I know that page rank applies to the first page then once the page rank for that page gets high enough the bots dig a little deeper and find the forums but if my front page has very little text and a ton of images that will look cool to a user but be crap for a bot.

I don't think that's true at all.

Myself, I'd never let a forum use the "first level domain" (or whatever it should be called) for its URL, not even if the forum was all I had. If I wanted to add more content later (and you already have that) the structure would be very odd. I'd use a subdomain or just a directory (forums.example.com or example.com/forums/).

[Darin McGrew]

Using a subdomain for your forums also makes it easy to keep the load on your forum server from affecting the server used for the rest of your site.