Basic Review
Site Name: Zaps Technology Forum
Site Type: Technology
Age: >2 years
Appearance
Appearance is not bad. Starting with the logo is actually looks quite nice. I like the glow effect it has on it. The forums seem pretty interesting to view. The top navigation bar looks good so everything is easy to work around. Nice touches. The way you customized it makes the forum a lot more appealing. It's nice how the chat tells you how many people are there so that you find good times to come in. Of course, one thing that's strange is that the word Forums appears in the navigation twice, when it is really needed only once. I might also add that you could get a favicon for your forum as well, since it's the default IPB icon. Also, when I entered the chat room, and I left, the '1' number was still there saying I was still in the chat even though I left. So I think that may be a tiny problem. Other than that, really the rest is good.
Layout
Layout is good. The forums are all organized correctly. I was surprised to see really no off-topic category for your forum, though it still had quite a large amount of posts, so that looked really good to me. Again, I'm considering that you remove one of the "Forums" text in the navigation to get rid of repetition. I would also recommend that you move the "Upcoming Calendar Events" and "Birthdays" widgets below the "Recent Status Updates" widget because people are much less likely to view those and that could improve the overall aesthetics of the forum. Also I discovered there were 2 Member Categories in the Gallery section, maybe you could be a bit more creative with those titles and not repeat them! The forums themselves seem organized well and you have a wide scope for your members to discuss about, so that part seems nicely done. I also realized, "Members" was duplicated in the navigation bar too, so that could be fixed as well.
Statistics and Activity
The forum has 1,828 posts coming from 257 members with 110 being most online. The member half of the statistics is looking really good! But for a forum that's been around for over 2 years, about 1,828 posts seems a little slow. You also only have just one post in the "Announcements" section of your forum, which I found quite odd. The posts do seem spread out though, and not too much portion comes out of the administrators. Though the "Active posts" seem a bit slacking. I did find it a bit nice to see the posting activity by time, though I'd admit. So, some areas of this are good and some not so good. Just keep working on it and focus the attention to activity!
Content
I actually didn't realize your off-topic section was at the top category! But then I realized that this section had the most posts out of all your forums. In that light, I'd advise you add more posts to the on-topic sections as well and make them quality! There's a lot of good content there, so keep it up. Your forum is doing pretty good all-around.
Organisation and SEO
The site zapstech.net has an Alexa rank of 4,062,078 with 12 sites linking in. This is pretty good but again, could be improved considering how long your site has been open. Keep promoting and put your site out there. It would be beneficial to improving your traffic and your SEO rank in the future.
Words from the Reviewer
Your forums look pretty good. Kudos for having it open for so long. I hope everything goes well for you, and good luck!
After reading your review, please click here to rate your review.
