Basic Review
Site Name: ChatBB
Site Type: Chat / Webmaster Forum
Age: 3-4 Months Old
Appearance
Your forum's theme appears to be fairly decent, however I have several ideas to improve your forums looks. When I first clicked onto your website, the first thing that grabbed my attention was the heavy contrast between the numerous dark shades versus the blue categories, all on the white background. I typically advise my design clients and those who seek my design critique to shy away from using a color with both black and white. It creates an eye sore feeling when ineffectively used. While I wouldn't say your design is discouraging users, it can be fixed by changing numerous colors in your style. To fix this, I would recommend doing two simple things: (1) If you would like to keep the blue color in your design, I recommend reducing the contrast by making your theme's background slightly darker (maybe from #FFFFFF to #E8E8E8, or a shade of grey that is just slightly lighter than the grey on the sides), and (2) make the grey box colors including the post box, the box below the header, and the box above the footer, are a lighter shade of grey (like possibly #949494) and make sure this applies to any of the grey boxes throughout your forum. One thing in your design that did not grab my attention was your forum's logo. To improve this, I recommend making the "ChatBB" a bit thicker, so the blue will pop out more. Additionally, I also recommend making your subtext/slogan on the logo lighter to increase the contrast of the grey/black, as right now it is hard to read (perhaps change the hex value to #797979, like what it is in your footer). And finally, I recommend changing the color of the links present in the "Welcome to ChatBB.net, Fellow Guest! Please Register or Login to be able to chat on our forum freely." to a dark grey instead of solid black, perhaps like #454545. All together, these small improvements should reduce the contrast of your forum overall, and make it more visually friendly.
Layout
The forum appears to have a pleasant, strong layout. There are just about the right amount of boards on your index, although you have room to add a few more to the index, if you wanted. I also like how you divided up the categories to all have the same amount of boards. I have a few recommendations for you. I would first move the General category above the Webmaster section because your forum name is ChatBB and the "chat" should be the focus of your forum. Additionally, your Technical Education board seems to be the odd one out in the general category. Personally, I would consider this more as a part of a Webmaster board, however this may just be because I'm unsure what technical help you are referring to. If you keep it in the General category, I would suggest flipping Media Center and Technical Education so that Media Center appears first, as this is a more broad board. The last thing I would suggest would be for you to change the order of the boards so that the general chat board is first on the list, as it is the most important to your forum.
Statistics and Activity
This is an area of your forum that your forum needs some improvement on. It appears that your forum has been open for 3-4 months, but only has a total 108 posts from 17 members. These are pretty low numbers considering your forum's age. I am quite aware the activity can be the hardest part of the forum to handle, however there are still a few things you can do. I would highly recommend looking into posting packages provide here by both our fantastic Package Team and forum members via the forum cash and marketplace exchange boards. While these members will most likely not be active upon completion of your package, they can hopefully provide enough discussion topics / responses to help raise posting opportunities for members of your forum. In order for that to be effective though, you will need to promote your forum to others members. I typically advise users to run contests, however it appears you are already running one. It appears though that no one is taking part in your contest currently. Make sure you spread the word out in as many places as possible.
Content
Your forum seems to be lacking in content. The majority of your 39 topics come from the introduction board, and then the rest are scattered equally throughout your forum. I noticed that even though you are a Chat forum, you are lacking content in the chat boards. Only a handful of topics have been made in these boards. As previously mentioned, would advise that you create more discussion topics for members, and order some post packages to help produce content. I think the majority of your issue in this category results from the lack of user activity though.
Organisation and SEO
I think I have covered a sufficient amount of organization suggestions in the layout section of this review. Refer back there for some general advise. One other piece of advice is to simplify the your forums Chat board, as it is too organized. I noticed that your forum has a 3 sub boards inside Fun Box, which is contained in the general chat board. I think that you should get rid of the forum games and joke board and just allow users to post these topics in the Fun Box. Moreover, you could simply move the debate board to just be a sub board of the general chat board instead. Moving on to SEO, you could easily improve your SEO. For one, your forum lacks backlinks. According to Alexa, you only have 11. You can increase this number by adding links to your site in more locations. This in turn will help with your SEO. I also advise making your keyword density slightly better. By this, I mean you should tailor your main page to increase the appearances of key words of your site, like "chat". "Chat" appears about twice as much as all the other words on your forum, however this is the only keyword that stands out. Perhaps you can promote other keywords, like web, webmaster, talk, etc.
Words from the Reviewer
I think your forum has a lot of potential. Your forum currently looks pretty decent, but it could easily be made into great by adjusting some colors. The layout of your forum is probably the strongest part of your forum, although it could still be revised and made slightly better. The weakest spot of your forum is the lack of activity and content. Hopefully, by implementing some of the ideas listed above, your forum can thrive from success. I wish you all the best on your forum. Good luck!
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