Basic Review
Site Name: http://techspout.com/
Site Type:General computer forum
Age:Barely 5 months
Appearance
The appearance of the forum is good, and pleasing to the eye, the colours compliment each other well, making the forum look a little professional, One thing I would do is get a banner made by someone who is very good at graphics, if I’m honest yours looks as though it has been drawn by a five year old, harsh but true, the banner is also overpowered by the guest welcome message, it needs to be made bigger, and made more prominent, our graphics team can sort this out for you.
Layout
The layout is slightly confusing, forums appear to have been added at random to the categories, without any real thought going into their placings, for instance you have IT news in the same category as Announcements & Complaints and suggestions, not the right place I feel.
From reading the forum descriptions I can tell that English is not your first language, the grammar needs a lot of tweaking, the mistakes are too many to mention here, ideally you need a person with very good English on your admin team to make the edits.
Statistics and Activity
You stated in your review request that the forum is suffering from inactivity.
My impression and experience tells me that you are expecting too much after such a short time, prior to launch we on the review team recommend a minimum of 1k in posts, you have just over 500, 249 of which are by VB’s News Bot.
Installing a NEWS BOT will not get you traffic, all the newsbot is doing is posting one line of an article, and the link to it, bots follow the link, simple really.
So in reality your forum barely has 300 posts!
Content
As stated above, around half of your posts are four or five words at the most, with a link off site, that is not good and needs to be cured.
Firstly you need to direct all the bot posts to a hidden forum, that only Admin can read, you also need to tell bots NOT to go in that forum, you do that by using
Robots.txt
Then you need to select each article you think is worth posting, re-write it, then post it up on your forum.
At the moment you are telling search engines to go elsewhere for the information.
Organisation and SEO
Your inactivity has a lot to do with your SEO, or lack of it, you need to submit your site to as many web directories as possible, you also need to register with Google and Bing, I don’t think you have already done this.
Some people will tell you not to use a sitemap, others will tell you it’s essential, both are true, confused, well some search engines are intelligent enough to find their way around your site on their own ( google, Bing, Yahoo), others get distracted by outbound links, and therefore take a lot longer to crawl the site, a sitemap gives them instructions of where to look for the information, I use this little gem
www.freesitemapgenerator.com it constructs an XML sitemap, all you have to do is download the finished article and then upload it to your root directory.
Words from the Reviewer
You need a lot more content before you will attract a serious amount of Members, membership looks high, but again when you do a little research you will see that a large number of your members are actually spammers who have never posted, you only have to look at the usernames to see which ones are genuine and which ones are spam, you certainly need some kind of anti spam in your registration process, that tell me you have none, or that it is very simple to get past.
Some people have misconception about the internet and forums, quite a few forums fail because the person starting them up fails to recognise that actually making a forum is the easiest part, literally anyone can do it, the hard work starts once you have built it, I’ve said before that I have never come across a unique forum, think of any subject, google it, and there will be a forum for it, so any new forum in a niche like yours has to stand out to attract members, in order to do that it needs to be different, or it has to get the news out there quicker than the other forums.
Here is what I feel you need to do :
• Of your social site links only the facebook one works properly, the twitter one doesn’t work at all, you need to set up a twitter account for that, the YouTube link takes you to a page which has nothing to do with your forum
• Your Forum is still using the VB favicon, get your own and change it
• The banner needs immediate attention, it’s too small and lacks professional quality
• You need to employ better anti spam measures at registration
• You need to look at the forums you have, and the categories they are in, you also need to think that you may have too many forums for the age of the board
• Register your site with Web directories, get indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo
• Move the Newsbot posts to a hidden forum,set up Robots.txt, and a sitemap
• Work on the content, make sure it is all your own work, give the members you do have something to reply to and talk about
• Time… nothing will happen overnight, it can take months or even years for a forum to become successful, be patient, work hard, and don’t get downhearted if things seem to be taking a long time.
Star Rating
2.
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