One Piece Forums
Review by Cosmic
First Impressions
[note]========== BEGIN - First Impressions ==========[/note]
The first thing I noticed about your forum, which kept irking me, was the logo. I do not like the animation. It is very distracting, and not really necessary. The theme you are using is pretty good, but I don't think it really fits the subject which your forum is about. Overall, there is nothing actively bad about my first expression except for the logo, so I am scoring this section as Average.
[note]========== END - First Impressions ==========[/note]
Average
Design Quality
[note]========== BEGIN - Design Quality ==========[/note]
As said in the previous section of this review, your design is not related to One Piece, except for the logo. I recommend choosing forum-specific icons which are related to your niche to liven things up again, and maybe adding in a couple of images here and there, such as in the corner of category headers, to make your forum look more lively. Regarding your logo, I recommend removing the animation, and adding a shadow to make it stand out more. That said, you did pick a good theme, and I think it's a good one to base an improved theme on. You need to focus on improving that theme by making modifications to it, rather than starting with a completely new theme.
[note]========== END - Design Quality ==========[/note]
Average
Site Statistics
[note]========== BEGIN - Site Statistics ==========[/note]
The statistics for this website are very good, overall. 21,000 posts is excellent for a forum started in 2014, and with 154 members as well. Your statistics related to one piece, specifically, though, are very disappointing. I count about 1,000 one-piece related posts, going by the statistics for each forum. If your forum will continue to be about one piece, I recommend focusing more on that aspect. If not, it is perfectly acceptable to change what your forum is about. That said, your forum does have a good post count, so kudos for the hard work!
[note]========== END - Site Statistics ==========[/note]
Average
Staff Professionalism
[note]========== BEGIN - Staff Professionalism ==========[/note]
The first thing I noticed in regards to your staff is that Administrators and former staff have the same username color. This is very odd, in my opinion. I recommend finding a new color. When looking at your team page, you appear to have a reasonable number of stuff members. It is odd that Shaurya, an administrator, has not logged in for a couple weeks, although it is possible that (s)he has announced an absence, and if that's the case, then it's fine. When examining post counts, I noticed that yours is pretty small. Are you the owner of the forum? If so, I highly recommend posting more often on the forum.
I also noticed a few issues with the professionalism of staff posts within the new and announcements forum.
1. There seem to be semi-frequent grammatical errors in announcement posts. Good grammar is difficult, and I'm sure you could find a couple of mistakes somewhere in this review, but I still recommend working on this, particularly for announcements.
2. Regarding this post here:
http://onepieceforum.net/Thread-Recruitment--7970 I realize that you are catering to your anime audience here, but some of the post was difficult to read. I recommend mixing professionalism together with flavor, rather than making the post too "fun."
That said, your staff team is pretty well balanced. There are a few issues, but you are doing fairly well in terms of staff professionalism.
[note]========== END - Staff Professionalism ==========[/note]
Poor
Originality
[note]========== BEGIN - Originality ==========[/note]
I am not aware of any other one-piece related forums advertised here on FP. I'm sure that there are others, but this seems to be a relatively small niche. However, there is nothing much to differentiate you from your competition. In fact, on Google, I found a competiting forum which is much better than yours in many aspects. There's nothing you can't fix, but I think you need to work on this.
The website I am referring to is:
http://opforum.net/
Their design has been customized to specifically relate to one piece, which makes it look very good and much more professional. Also, they have a better post count, although your post count is competitive. The best thing about this forum, though, is that it has a lot of content relating to one piece, even as a percentage. About 1/20 of your posts are related to one piece. For this forum, 45/178 posts are about one piece. That's 0.05%, compared to 25%.
Originality has many aspects. One is how many competitors you have. Another is how your competitors compare to you. What does your forum have to offer that your competitors do not?
[note]========== END - Originality ==========[/note]
Poor
Site Structure
[note]========== BEGIN - Site Structure ==========[/note]
Your website structure needs a lot of work, in my opinion. I will focus on the one-piece related forums, as these are the most important. The three general forums related to one piece (Anime, Manga, and General) should all be merged together, in my opinion. You can use forum prefixes to indicate threads related specifically to the manga, so that people will not accidentally ready spoilers. "One piece fun corner," in my opinion, isn't terribly specific. I recommend splitting that forum up into several specific forums, all on the index page. The competitor forum I mentioned under the originality section does this very well.
[note]========== END - Site Structure ==========[/note]
Very Poor
Grammar & Spelling
[note]========== BEGIN - Grammar & Spelling ==========[/note]
There are some grammatical and semantic errors which I would like to point out in your structure. First of all, I recommend spelling out your forum names as titles. That means capitalizing the letter of each word (with a few exceptions, such as "of." For example, "One piece anime discussions" should be "One Piece Anime Discussions." There are two reasons for this. First of all, it is technically incorrect to spell "One piece," because One Piece is the name of a proper noun, and should be capitalized as "One Piece," just like the Dickens novel "Great Expectations" is not spelled "Great expectations." Second, since the forum is itself a title, it makes the most sense to treat it as such, and to capitalize each letter. While this may not be technically incorrect grammar, it is a convention used by almost all forums, and one I recommend you follow. Whatever you decide, make sure to be consistent, as some of your forum names do capitalize each word.
[note]========== END - Grammar & Spelling ==========[/note]
Poor
Final Remarks
Your forum needs a lot of work. It is a very valuable forum, with what seems to be a good community, but you need to work on your design and structure, and you need to make your forum more unique from your competition.
This is a good forum, and I believe it can, will, and has gone far! Good luck!
Your Score
