First Impressions: (10 out of 15)
I had some pretty good first impressions. I think the first thing that I thought was that the site looked very professional. The logo fit in nicely, there weren't granulated photos or images that looked unprofessional, and the site overall looked okay. To me that's always key.
I then looked through the categories and forums briefly. I thought everything was in order and everything looked to have a place and was semi-thought out as to what you were thinking.
I was really shocked by all of the white on the background of the forum under the big gray banner at the top. The site was very bright and didn't seem to have much depth as first glance.
Overall, at first glance, I liked what I saw. Nice work.
Site Structure: (13 out of 15)
I must compliment you here because I think you nailed it with your categories and the forums within. Your theme works really nicely to show that the site isn't cumbersome and filled with useless forums. Each forum has a straightforward name and everyone knows what to expect when they click and go into the forum. Excellent work.
My only suggestion would be is that I don't think you need a separate Media and Sports discussion areas. I think you should really focus on the nitty gritty of business development and condense those two into the "General Discussion" forum. I'm happy that you placed this section at the bottom too as you are putting what you feel is most important at the top. I like that you put the "Starting Your Business" first. You can have some really important discussions within that section and it's a rather popular section because that is always the first question to new business owners or potential owners.
Overall, I think you structured the site very well and I am impressed with the thought you put into the behind the scenes work. Very nice.
Design Quality: (6 out of 15)
The design is probably something I have the biggest grievance about. I think it is important that you get a bigger logo. I like the logo you have because you will be able to brand that well, but the logo text itself is not anything that is super appealing. You need something classy to sell your website to potential customers/users. I would strong recommend increasing the size of the logo and the logo text so that you have two things you can brand, the logo and the text.
I have to say this from the start, I am not a fan of all the white in the bottom section behind the forum. I think that it lacks depth and it just looks very plain. Depth is important because it plays a visual game with people experiencing your site for the first time. It will stop users from noticing the lack of content and they will say, "You know what this is real nice." My recommendation would be adding some sort of background color, or even better yet, a subtle background image that can play nicely with the gray in the banner up top. This will definitely make your site more aesthetically pleasing to the regular user who is debating whether they should join or not.
Originality: (11 out of 15)
I think you have something here that can be quite original. Just a simple Google search lead me to only two business forums. One had almost 100,000 posts and the other had less than that. This means that the market is not over-saturated with business related forums. I did not do an in-depth search as I'm sure there are some others out there, but you may be onto something here. I did notice some similarities between your site and theirs, so I would definitely recommend checking out the competition and seeing what you can do to make your site even more original.
I think you have something good here that you can market well. Your site looked much more appealing than the two that I found. With some work and real original thought, I think you can have something real good here.
Overall Mark: (40 out of 60)
I think you're off to a good start. I didn't have anywhere to talk about statistics, but you have been open almost a month and you should have much more topics and posts than you do. I would work on filling up your site before going public next time. Overall though, I think you have something you can work with in an under-saturated market. Best of luck in the future.
