Nice proffesional looking website from just seeing the homepage, i didnt go to deep into the content really.
I am usually not a fan of 'dark' templates, but yours looks great!
I know i have seen you requesting a new logo, and that is about the only thing i noticed that could be improved for sure. In my opinion though, the one you have in the screenshot i am providing in my review here would look ALOT better then the one that is there now.
I am usually not a fan of 'dark' templates, but yours looks great!
I know i have seen you requesting a new logo, and that is about the only thing i noticed that could be improved for sure. In my opinion though, the one you have in the screenshot i am providing in my review here would look ALOT better then the one that is there now.
Thanks for the feedback. The theme as allot of options. All colors can be changed. The theme also has an white option to make it from dark to white.
The baysideGamers in red is an text CSS format not an image.
Your reviewer has changed!
Sorry for the inconvenience. Your reviewer has changed. This review will be completed within 48 hours of this new tag. Myself and Xanaftp shall be completing this review as a joint effort to ensure it is completed quickly due to the long wait time you've had already.
Thank you for your understanding 🙂
Hey @Empire,
Firstly, on behalf of the entire Editorial Team, I want to apologise for the time you have waited and for the circumstances which unfortunately and unpreventabley occurred which slowed down your wait time even more. Thank you for your utmost patience and understanding during these times. Here is your review! 🙂
First Impressions (Jointly):
One thing that initially put me off overall, was the slow load times and lagging of the forum when visiting another page or scrolling down the page- I'm not sure if it's server-related or front-end and in relation to your dynamic aspects of the site, but Bayside Gamers loaded quite slow for both of us. Another aspect which was a bit daunting, was the mass of "Stuff Going On", Sidebars, footer, header and also the main text body with various features. You could do with reducing the overall number of things going on, on your first page and give a more simplistic outlook of the site upon the first glance.
Onto things that you've done well; I really liked the navigational bar which presented a minimal amount of pages, but all ones that are important, and made it easy to quickly move on from the (cluttered) homepage. Another aspect I liked on my first glance, was the commonality and consistency with your design and styling across the entire site which gave a seamless movement (if the site was a bit faster 😛) from page to page.
Overall, our first impressions of Bayside Gamers were a bit mixed, with both positive and negatives on our initial glance. Therefore, we feel the grade for this section is:
Average
Number of Posts & Members (Myers):
Taking a look at the Statistics panel of your site in the sidebar it gives me these figures:
Given the length of time Bayside Gamers has been running for, I would have imagined that it would have a higher amount of both Members and Posts including from your Staffing Team than this figure. Having around 200 members to only 3000 pieces of content on average isn't really a good ratio.
When I took a look at your profile as the owner, I further found out around 1/4 of this content has been created by you meaning the members of the site account for the other (small) 3/4 of the overall content. Normally the owner, does normally have the highest content count though, will have a small influence on the ratio of posts by members but this isn't the case here.
Having a look at the number of members you have, you have had 800+ users online at once (I'm guessing this was a particularly busy time where a lot of Guests and Crawlers online at once) but given that the average forum only has around 60 bots, you can only guess, that you had a high amount of guests online during this time, but few signed up. While gaining members is hard, in your case you only have 199 on a forum that has been running for quite a while.
Overall, I feel that you have a good member basis (They are relativly active, just not in high quantities) I feel, possibly they are too busy with other aspects of your site- Gallery, Articles etc. (And a chatbox if you have one) rather than the main Community. With a bit more advertisement and promotin I feel this number could increase though, as you have a good site.
Number Of Posts & Members Grade: Poor
Activity Level (Myers):
Having a look at the basic statistics that each forum gives, I can see an inconsistent list of variables varying from a few hours to a few months. This generally isn't the best way of going about posting around the forum. Obviously, members will all have varying interests and the posts they make in the different forum sections is going to be dependant on what they are interested in but you as Staff Members / As The Owner, should be filling in the sections which receive the fewest activity. As discussed a bit more in the Originality section of the review later on, there is a lot of gaming sites, and you as Staff need to be selling all aspects of the Community and Site to engage with potential members (Guests) and make it appear as you have a friendly and active community, which is what we as guests, look for. I would not be compelled, solely looking at the activity levels, to join your site, and this should not be the case. An example of your varying time is: Open Discussion- 2hrs ago and Misc.Modifications- March. This is a huge time to go without posts, and if you as a guest, have an interest in this particular section, then what is your reason to join if that section is dead? You as the Owner, need to make sure you are catering for all potential guests if you have those sections there already, and use them as a catalyst to reel in these guests and turn them into active members.
Average
Site Structure (xanaftp):
Overall I think the structure of the website has been pretty well thought out. You have clear menu items that take you to various distinct locations of the forums. The menu is at the very top and is thus very visible. I really like how the menu sticks to the top of the screen as well when you scroll (unless your screen size enters "mobile size"). I also like how it responsively adapts itself according to the size of your screen. However I personally think "donations" does not belong in the elite gaming store simply because donations are not purchases. I can see why you placed it in the store section though, but I'd also consider thinking about whether or not it may better belong in the community section. Reason being is because donations are a community effort to support a website and keep it running. It's not something the website themselves sell, which a store does. I would also advise shortening the top menu a bit, either by shortening the names of the top level items or by merging together groups to lessen the number of top level items. The "preferred" number of items on a top level menu is 5 or less, according to studies done on user rentention and conversions. When you have more than 5 items, you start to create feelings of overwhelm in users, unless you use something called a "mega menu" (Amazon's menu of product departments, for example).
I like how you have laid out on the home page the most recent activity, such as images and videos. I also enjoy that you have a promotional image slider that gives people a graphical sneak peak at the website. I would, however, like to see some forum-related recent activity on the home page as well, and personally find it unnecessary to have recent topics in the footer (the forums are a big part of the website and should get decent attention).
Your forums are for the most part structured nicely, though I feel you could merge together the Grand Theft Auto IV and V forums to save space on the forum page (this is only my opinion though; I'd advise doing what you feel is best for your community. For example, if you REALLY want to give GTA exposure and don't mind the extra page space use, then I would advise against taking on my suggestion.). Here are two potential ways you can do this:
a) Instead, make a top forum "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "Grand Theft Auto V" in the "Games We Play" group... and add appropriate sub-forums (discussion & Media, Vehicle & Script modifications, and so on).
b) Make a "Grand Theft Auto" forum group. Then make a forum for each GTA version. And finally, a sub-forum for each topic in each GTA version forum (discussions, modifications, etc).
A suggestion for website issues is to categorise or prefix them according to status, as is a bug tracker. For example, "new", "confirmed", "in progress", "completed", "closed", "rejected", "needs feedback".
Other than the points above, I think you did a great job with the site structure.
Structure Verdict: Good
Design Quality (xanaftp):
I don't have much to say for design quality because overall this website has excellent design quality. I love the sleek, modern, responsive theme you have for the website. It captures the feel of gaming forum very nicely. The responsiveness works great; I cannot find any major areas where responsiveness breaks. The styling of the responsive themes at various screen sizes looks very professional. The website works very smoothly and is intuitive. And overall, it is very attractive.
I did unfortunately hesitate to give this an excellent rating and instead settled for good. This is because of more technical reasons. For instance, despite your website being very mobile friendly in terms of usability, your mobile website uses a ton of data for its images. This is bad for people with limited mobile data. I would highly recommend trying to reduce image sizes for those who load the website on a mobile screen size. My recommendation is to add CSS (perhaps also coupled with javascript if necessary) to prevent the loading of images that are not used based on the initial size of the screen when the website is loaded. If someone changes their screen size, and an image that hasn't been loaded needs to load, then Javascript or CSS can load it then. See Google PageSpeed Insights for more information.
Your mobile website also has a lot of render-blocking Javascript. This means a lot of your content depends on the loading of Javascript before it is displayed to the user. You should make your site more asynchronous... that-is try to eliminate the need for your content to have to wait for Javascript before it is rendered to the user. This will give the users the impression your website loads faster. Sure, speed is important, but what is REALLY important is how long a user must wait before content begins to get served to them in their browser. If it takes too long (3 seconds or more usually), users will get the impression the website is not responding or working and will therefore leave.
Design Verdict: Good
Originality (Myers):
When it comes to the originality of your niche, gaming, it is quite a common one found on the Online World. As such, I took a look at the site and instead asked myself: "What has he done to make this site different from other Gaming Sites" and this is where I have taken my grading and comments from 🙂
Taking a look at the Forum Aspect of your site, I noticed a few really nice and quirky things which added a bit of a change to the bland flat, forum/discussion look.
In the forum area, you could consider Forum Icons however, to add a bit to the Visuals of the Community.
Moving onto the general pages of the site.
Good
Spelling, Grammar & Professionalism (xanaftp):
I'll be upfront and honest. Bayside's weakest point is the grammar and spelling. There are a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes on this website which make many aspects of it hard to read and understand. The list of errors in grammar and spelling is huge, so I will not mention all of them. I will however mention the big areas. My best advice overall is to critically analyze the spelling and the grammar on the entire website. If you are not strong in English, I'd also recommend hiring on someone who is for the sole purpose of proofreading every page you make and every correspondance you send. Once you get your website's English up to par and beyond, I feel your Bayside website would receive a much better overall mark than we have decided. The grammar is a serious issue and could be a major turn-off for users.
The about us is a critical section, so I will critique that first:
Professionalism Verdict: Poor
Things you liked best about forum: You incorporated some very original ideas into the community in order to encourage positive contributions & the high quality of your sites design and structure of it.
Thing you liked least about forum: The Poor level of Spelling & Grammar which servery effects the professionalism and professional outlook of the forum- this let down the overall grade down quite a bit.
Firstly, on behalf of the entire Editorial Team, I want to apologise for the time you have waited and for the circumstances which unfortunately and unpreventabley occurred which slowed down your wait time even more. Thank you for your utmost patience and understanding during these times. Here is your review! 🙂
Advanced Review of Bayside Gamers
http://baysidegamers.com
Joint Review by Myers & Xanaftp
http://baysidegamers.com
Joint Review by Myers & Xanaftp
One thing that initially put me off overall, was the slow load times and lagging of the forum when visiting another page or scrolling down the page- I'm not sure if it's server-related or front-end and in relation to your dynamic aspects of the site, but Bayside Gamers loaded quite slow for both of us. Another aspect which was a bit daunting, was the mass of "Stuff Going On", Sidebars, footer, header and also the main text body with various features. You could do with reducing the overall number of things going on, on your first page and give a more simplistic outlook of the site upon the first glance.
Onto things that you've done well; I really liked the navigational bar which presented a minimal amount of pages, but all ones that are important, and made it easy to quickly move on from the (cluttered) homepage. Another aspect I liked on my first glance, was the commonality and consistency with your design and styling across the entire site which gave a seamless movement (if the site was a bit faster 😛) from page to page.
Overall, our first impressions of Bayside Gamers were a bit mixed, with both positive and negatives on our initial glance. Therefore, we feel the grade for this section is:
Average
Taking a look at the Statistics panel of your site in the sidebar it gives me these figures:
General Statistics
Total Topics
- 629
Total Posts
- 2,757
Total Members
- 199
Most Online
- 825
- 09/07/2016 11:40 AM
Given the length of time Bayside Gamers has been running for, I would have imagined that it would have a higher amount of both Members and Posts including from your Staffing Team than this figure. Having around 200 members to only 3000 pieces of content on average isn't really a good ratio.
When I took a look at your profile as the owner, I further found out around 1/4 of this content has been created by you meaning the members of the site account for the other (small) 3/4 of the overall content. Normally the owner, does normally have the highest content count though, will have a small influence on the ratio of posts by members but this isn't the case here.
Having a look at the number of members you have, you have had 800+ users online at once (I'm guessing this was a particularly busy time where a lot of Guests and Crawlers online at once) but given that the average forum only has around 60 bots, you can only guess, that you had a high amount of guests online during this time, but few signed up. While gaining members is hard, in your case you only have 199 on a forum that has been running for quite a while.
Overall, I feel that you have a good member basis (They are relativly active, just not in high quantities) I feel, possibly they are too busy with other aspects of your site- Gallery, Articles etc. (And a chatbox if you have one) rather than the main Community. With a bit more advertisement and promotin I feel this number could increase though, as you have a good site.
Number Of Posts & Members Grade: Poor
Having a look at the basic statistics that each forum gives, I can see an inconsistent list of variables varying from a few hours to a few months. This generally isn't the best way of going about posting around the forum. Obviously, members will all have varying interests and the posts they make in the different forum sections is going to be dependant on what they are interested in but you as Staff Members / As The Owner, should be filling in the sections which receive the fewest activity. As discussed a bit more in the Originality section of the review later on, there is a lot of gaming sites, and you as Staff need to be selling all aspects of the Community and Site to engage with potential members (Guests) and make it appear as you have a friendly and active community, which is what we as guests, look for. I would not be compelled, solely looking at the activity levels, to join your site, and this should not be the case. An example of your varying time is: Open Discussion- 2hrs ago and Misc.Modifications- March. This is a huge time to go without posts, and if you as a guest, have an interest in this particular section, then what is your reason to join if that section is dead? You as the Owner, need to make sure you are catering for all potential guests if you have those sections there already, and use them as a catalyst to reel in these guests and turn them into active members.
Average
Overall I think the structure of the website has been pretty well thought out. You have clear menu items that take you to various distinct locations of the forums. The menu is at the very top and is thus very visible. I really like how the menu sticks to the top of the screen as well when you scroll (unless your screen size enters "mobile size"). I also like how it responsively adapts itself according to the size of your screen. However I personally think "donations" does not belong in the elite gaming store simply because donations are not purchases. I can see why you placed it in the store section though, but I'd also consider thinking about whether or not it may better belong in the community section. Reason being is because donations are a community effort to support a website and keep it running. It's not something the website themselves sell, which a store does. I would also advise shortening the top menu a bit, either by shortening the names of the top level items or by merging together groups to lessen the number of top level items. The "preferred" number of items on a top level menu is 5 or less, according to studies done on user rentention and conversions. When you have more than 5 items, you start to create feelings of overwhelm in users, unless you use something called a "mega menu" (Amazon's menu of product departments, for example).
I like how you have laid out on the home page the most recent activity, such as images and videos. I also enjoy that you have a promotional image slider that gives people a graphical sneak peak at the website. I would, however, like to see some forum-related recent activity on the home page as well, and personally find it unnecessary to have recent topics in the footer (the forums are a big part of the website and should get decent attention).
Your forums are for the most part structured nicely, though I feel you could merge together the Grand Theft Auto IV and V forums to save space on the forum page (this is only my opinion though; I'd advise doing what you feel is best for your community. For example, if you REALLY want to give GTA exposure and don't mind the extra page space use, then I would advise against taking on my suggestion.). Here are two potential ways you can do this:
a) Instead, make a top forum "Grand Theft Auto IV" and "Grand Theft Auto V" in the "Games We Play" group... and add appropriate sub-forums (discussion & Media, Vehicle & Script modifications, and so on).
b) Make a "Grand Theft Auto" forum group. Then make a forum for each GTA version. And finally, a sub-forum for each topic in each GTA version forum (discussions, modifications, etc).
A suggestion for website issues is to categorise or prefix them according to status, as is a bug tracker. For example, "new", "confirmed", "in progress", "completed", "closed", "rejected", "needs feedback".
Other than the points above, I think you did a great job with the site structure.
Structure Verdict: Good
I don't have much to say for design quality because overall this website has excellent design quality. I love the sleek, modern, responsive theme you have for the website. It captures the feel of gaming forum very nicely. The responsiveness works great; I cannot find any major areas where responsiveness breaks. The styling of the responsive themes at various screen sizes looks very professional. The website works very smoothly and is intuitive. And overall, it is very attractive.
I did unfortunately hesitate to give this an excellent rating and instead settled for good. This is because of more technical reasons. For instance, despite your website being very mobile friendly in terms of usability, your mobile website uses a ton of data for its images. This is bad for people with limited mobile data. I would highly recommend trying to reduce image sizes for those who load the website on a mobile screen size. My recommendation is to add CSS (perhaps also coupled with javascript if necessary) to prevent the loading of images that are not used based on the initial size of the screen when the website is loaded. If someone changes their screen size, and an image that hasn't been loaded needs to load, then Javascript or CSS can load it then. See Google PageSpeed Insights for more information.
Your mobile website also has a lot of render-blocking Javascript. This means a lot of your content depends on the loading of Javascript before it is displayed to the user. You should make your site more asynchronous... that-is try to eliminate the need for your content to have to wait for Javascript before it is rendered to the user. This will give the users the impression your website loads faster. Sure, speed is important, but what is REALLY important is how long a user must wait before content begins to get served to them in their browser. If it takes too long (3 seconds or more usually), users will get the impression the website is not responding or working and will therefore leave.
Design Verdict: Good
When it comes to the originality of your niche, gaming, it is quite a common one found on the Online World. As such, I took a look at the site and instead asked myself: "What has he done to make this site different from other Gaming Sites" and this is where I have taken my grading and comments from 🙂
Taking a look at the Forum Aspect of your site, I noticed a few really nice and quirky things which added a bit of a change to the bland flat, forum/discussion look.
- Scrolling Affiliates. Having a dynamic aspect of a page is always a good thing and one that draws attention from users. I really liked how you allow your members to affiliate and have their banners added to this box. This is something that takes a more unique take on Affiliating and gaining other sites affiliation with your site and I feel was a really good implementation
- Having a look at the Sidebar, I noticed a bit more than the basic stats and facts that are normally presented in this area. I liked in particular the Twitter Feed which links in the site to Social Media, giving it even more of a presence in user's online life.
- Social Media Integration. This is something I touched upon above, but again was a feature I really liked. You displayed Sharing buttons across the site allowing a streamlined integration with the various "Socials" In addition to this your Social Login feature will further help you gain members
In the forum area, you could consider Forum Icons however, to add a bit to the Visuals of the Community.
Moving onto the general pages of the site.
- On the homepage I liked the addition of the gallery, presenting another aspect of the site which your users can use.
- One page I really loved was the Reviews/Articles section. This again adds another aspect of the community which your users can use and gives a bit more to the site than just a basic Discussion hub. In particular, the high quality and in depth content on the site provides a really meaningful purpose
- Activity. Your use of "Friendly Competitive Events" was a really good thing to do. I really like how you encourage your users to compete in posts and other statistical things which adds a reason and meaning to contribute well to the site. I also liked the "Activity Page" which displays personal statistics and information.
Good
I'll be upfront and honest. Bayside's weakest point is the grammar and spelling. There are a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes on this website which make many aspects of it hard to read and understand. The list of errors in grammar and spelling is huge, so I will not mention all of them. I will however mention the big areas. My best advice overall is to critically analyze the spelling and the grammar on the entire website. If you are not strong in English, I'd also recommend hiring on someone who is for the sole purpose of proofreading every page you make and every correspondance you send. Once you get your website's English up to par and beyond, I feel your Bayside website would receive a much better overall mark than we have decided. The grammar is a serious issue and could be a major turn-off for users.
The about us is a critical section, so I will critique that first:
- "So what can we tell you about ourselves?" - This is redundant and unnecessary. Users already know you're explaining who you are, so you don't need to ask what you can tell about yourself.
- "We are a group of like minded gamer's" - Only use apostrophes when indicating possessive nouns or indicating a contraction (eg. "it's" for "it is"). "Gamers" in this case is neither, and therefore an apostrophe is not necessary.
- "We are an modding community" - The rule of using "a" versus "an" is the following: If the proceeding word begins with a vowel sound (eg. "hour", "abstraction", "ordeal", and so on), use "an". Otherwise (eg. "horse", "dirty plate", "cookie", and so on), use "a". In this case, "modding" begins with an "m" sound, which is not vowel-like. Therefore, use "a modding community" instead of "an modding community".
- "We promise to provide the very best resources, Information on the best forum, and provide an awesome community for any gamers to utilize." - Lists are tricky. You need to be consistent with how you present your lists. For example, you should not have some of your lists begin with a verb and some of them not begin with a verb. Either all of them begin with a verb, or all of them do not begin with a verb. My suggestion is this: "We promise to provide the very best resources, Information on the best forum, and an awesome community for any gamers to utilize." (I took out "provide" in the last item).
- "Information on the best forum" - this specific list item is confusing to me. What exactly do you mean by providing information on the best forum?
- "Only for language packs the description can be in the language from the uploaded pack." - This came off pretty confusing. My suggestion: "The one exception is that, for language packs, descriptions can be in the language of the uploaded language pack."
- "Uploads your content in the Download system without passwords." - "your content in the Download system without passwords" is not a complete sentence. Revise to "Uploads to the download system should not be restricted with passwords." Also, I'd recommend putting a colon after the bolded "uploads" to indicate that "uploads" is not the rule, but rather a description/label of the rule which proceeds after.
- "Do not upload anything that you do not own or have permission to upload." - This is not widely practised but is recommended in a lot of guides: When using the "or" comparison operator, if the proceeding statement is negative (eg. "no", "not"), use "nor" instead. In this case, you do not want people uploading anything that they do not have permission to upload (thus it is negative), so you should use "nor". "Do not upload anything that you do not own nor have permission to upload."
- Broken files - I personally feel it is unprofessional to issue warnings to those who report downloads as broken when it works for other people. Doing so neglects to acknowledge that often, files and downloads will work on some systems but not on others. I suggest only issue warnings to those who report something as broken AND do not prove that it doesn't work /on their system/ (make clear of this in the guidelines). If I would receive a warning every time I report something broken that works for you, I would never report anything to begin with because I know things that don't work for me may work for others... thus the warning would be unfair and not worth my time reporting.
- "No spamming is characterized by the initiation of threads or posts that contribute nothing to a forum, be it off topic or on topic." - Put a period after the bold "No spamming" and then proceed with "Spamming is characterized...". Eg. "No spamming. Spamming is characterized..."
- "No advertising" Period after this to indicate the bolded statement is the rule and is a sentence. Do the same for all other like items (I won't repeat them in this critique for length sake).
- "You can advertise in this section ONLY." - Instead of saying "this section", make it say the name of the section (keep the hyperlink though). This will make it more immediately clear to users.
- "No Cross-Posting is when you post the same message multiple time in various threads or forums." . Revise to "No Cross-Posting. Cross-Posting is when you post..."
- "post the same message multiple time in various threads or forums." - "Multiple" is plural, and therefore "time" should be too. "Multiple times".
- "We will not tolerate abuse upon another member." This is not relevant to the section it is in (cursing) and thus should probably be moved or removed.
- "If we find that an image you post in your signature is offending to anyone" - Offending is a verb and therefore should not be proceeded with a preposition (to). Use "offensive" instead, or get rid of the "to".
- "If you do not like something that a Moderator or an Administrator did, sent them a Private Message." - Users did not already magically send them a private message when they read this, so use "send" (present) instead of "sent" (past).
- "about why a post has deleted/moved" - Posts do not delete and move themselves, so use "has been" or "was" instead.
- "Other administrative Personal" - Spelling error. "Personnel".
- "Anything that is not posted in forums, will be ignored or deleted." - A comma here is not necessary as you're not using lists nor conjunctions.
- "People who PM a STAFF members" - "a" is singular, so "members" should be singular as well. Use "a staff member" or "staff members" (without "a") instead.
- "If your avy is a gif" - It is not professional to use slang terms (avy) in website guidelines.
- "Signatures are only for membership only, as long as they don't expand the page and doesn't make your post blocks longer." - So if my signature expands the page or makes my post blocks longer, then I can use signatures as a guest? That's how this rule sounds to me. I'd revise it to be more clear.
- "Donation Now" button - I'd recommend using "donate now" instead... call to action buttons should begin with a verb so it's clear what you want your users to do.
- "The image must be less than 728×90px. Larger images will be resized." (found in affiliation purchases) - I thought the maximum permitted was 728x90. Shouldn't this be less than or equal to 728x90... or less than 729x91?
- "(Industry Standard - Full Banner)" (affiliation packages product description) - Also called "Leaderboards" if you wish to use that term.
- "Once you click "Add to Cart" You will be asked for the address of your site and to upload the banner image." (affiliate packages description) - That's already asked on the product details before you add to cart.
- "1 Month/30 days.If" (affiliate packages description) - Need a space after the period.
- "or downgrade your package!locations will be just above the page footer, then after the first topic in each forum and in the first post in each topic." (affiliate packages description) - Exclamation point not needed. Replace with a period (and add a space after it 😛).
- "I accept all image format" (affiliate packages description) - No you don't. You don't accept BMP for example. I'd suggest instead specifically mentioning the accepted formats (though it's already mentioned when one goes to upload the banner, so not even necessary IMO).
- "your banner will be linked to your website and an total of 30k impressions." (affiliate packages description) - Two unrelated concepts. They should probably be split into two separate sentences. Eg: "Your banner will be hyperlinked to your website. Your banner will receive a total of 30k impressions."
Professionalism Verdict: Poor
Things you liked best about forum: You incorporated some very original ideas into the community in order to encourage positive contributions & the high quality of your sites design and structure of it.
Thing you liked least about forum: The Poor level of Spelling & Grammar which servery effects the professionalism and professional outlook of the forum- this let down the overall grade down quite a bit.
Overall Mark:
Overall, Bayside Gamers is a great community, one with a solid design, great structure, lots of daily activity and a good member-base, however, some areas such as Spelling and the effect this has on the professionalism of the site could certainly be improved to make Bayside Gamers a successful and thriving gaming community ~ Myers.
Overall, Bayside Gamers is a great community, one with a solid design, great structure, lots of daily activity and a good member-base, however, some areas such as Spelling and the effect this has on the professionalism of the site could certainly be improved to make Bayside Gamers a successful and thriving gaming community ~ Myers.
It's running of from an shared hosting server, and so that's one major factor there also another website that using the same theme (the guy who made the theme) his website seems to be slow on the forum however on Firefox for me it's not so or lagging. From the gtmetrix results are very good and I know to the fact that I won't get 100% but being at around 90% plus is good, I also have to consider that I have cloudflare with some options enable like Gzip.
I haven't made any accounts to run under the group of "members" should have really! but most of the content is also from the reviews/article page and tended to post to members to get them going in a chat. It partly worked.
It was an very big boost that happened on that day, still can't work out of why it got to that max! Point is also all of that traffic with no new sign ups, that's the bad problem. But that was some time ago, before the theme that you see right now! back then it didn't have some cool affects and allot less posts. I can edit the 800+ can lower the number?
I don't force members to post in the area that they have no knowledge, however what I can do to get things rolling if it comes to it, make some accounts and posts in the boards that needs boosting. and have the content to grow.Activity Level (Myers):
Agree, I'll shell found another home for it 🙂 I also have donation sidebars on the home page and it's also added in each of my sig. This will be done.
I have to deeply consider this option, One of the main menu isn't available for the group guests to see so that goes down to six rather then seven, yet again if you think about it that there are allot of bigger websites that have more then six. The menu's bar are very important and something that I can't shorten, unless that I remove the activity page and add download and galley page together. This is also Myers point of view.
Good idea to have an GTA category into one, merged. But it's not easy as both games are different and other GTA websites don't have two different GTAs merged and that being said it but confess the members on what game is it for? like support for GTA5 and posted in GTAIV. The part A is out, rather have an category. Prefix is something that I can consider and can be added, that being said it's also an plugin that I can add for other boards. There aren't an prefix system on bayside other then tags and tags aren't good for that. prefix will be added to the list
This had my mind going regarding the results with mobile and it also slows down the website allot. So this is an major big important work that I need to work on. This is an on going progress and till this day I think that the code that I added is wrong or it's the right code but doesn't fully work. Images are big, yes. But I can't do edit all images that members upload, and to consider that half is done from IPB and they haven't fully made the improvements. This work sounds like I need an expert to help meDesign Quality (xanaftp):
I thought this might came alone with the review, 100% bad at grammar and spelling and I should get someone to come in for an week dealing what is needed to be "rewrite" Some points you added is built and added by IPB. When it comes down to posting/topics or uploading files or images that's by the members themselves and can't do much regarding that lol but my files uploaded I can. This part of the review is also first job on the list and should get someone to come in and deal with that.Spelling, Grammar & Professionalism (xanaftp):
Thanks for an great review, it's worth the wait
I made allot of changes to speed up the site, The Forum page has the worst score.. However https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.baysidegamers.com/ikCaQpW1 🙂
S T R I K E ' S R E V I E W
Hello @Empire, I know you have already had a great review from @Myers but I thought it could be good to tell you what I think. I really hope you don't mind.
First Impressions
WOW! I mean that your site is booming with content covering literally all my games. All the blog posts are filled with great information and are easy to understand. these posts look like they are backed up with some heavy research with makes your content more genuine.
Design:
Overall the layout is great the content is shown well on the page. I am not really a fan of dark designs but you have seemed to utilise this as an advantage rather than a disadvantage. I would suggest a little white or an extra colour here and there might improve the overall look of the site.
When posting the forum, functions very well but I do feel the forum board is a little cluttered, there is, in my opinion too much going on in the right column that subtracts you away from the forum content. I feel a balance of colours could help and for parts to get smaller in size. Try to use white space, it can be an asset.
Overall I think this is a well-rounded site, with an active community. I love it and hope you and your community all the best.
Already have that option, There is an white theme and a dark theme option 🙂 You pick your choice where the copyright is on the footer "theme"
🙂
Used to have an very big advert some weeks ago but I removed it as I merged some boards together. At the moment it will stay the right column as I find it very important for the members to see, I might do is cut down on the feed from 5 to 4 or even 3.
Hope to see you around more 🙂
It's just google fronts
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