Charlie's Chill
Full Review by Jadster
Scoring:
First Impressions & Appearance – (7 out of 20)
Let's start off this review by discussing my first impressions and the appearance of your site. Upon first visiting Charlie's Chill, I was very unimpressed with several aspects of the site in general. The theme didn't represent what your site was about, nor did the banner. Your site domain name doesn't make sense at all and doesn't say anything about what your site is about. For example, your site banner may match the theme but on both the left and right sides of the banner there is a faded image of a dog. Also, the slogan of your site "In Memory Forever" makes no sense as to what your site is actually about. I have seen this theme before but used on a gaming forum, not a general chat board. Not to mention, I don't even know what your site is all about. There is nothing that you have that shows what your site is about and the theme, domain, banner all don't seem to say anything about it either. This is very concerning for a site when the visitor can't even understand what the site is about. A successful site should have their visitors know what their site is about just by the name & domain name. Let alone the theme and professional look. Looking at all the open space you have, why do you have your site so squished in the center of the screen. You have a large amount of space you could take advantage of on both sides of the body of the forum but this is just left empty which is really just a waste of space. One other thing that I personally feel needs to be worked on or removed is the large advertisement you have on the home page. This isn't a members advertisement I can tell, I would have to say if you wish to make your site grow, you might want to remove that because it really looks disgusting on the home page of a forum to be honest. So overall, you have a lot of things you need to do better for this site in regards to its overall appearance. The banner, the domain, and even the theme in general needs to be worked on to make the site stand out. You want these things to really show what your site is all about, not make the visitors confused and want to leave.
Site Layout – (12 out of 20)
After taking a good look at your site, I found that the one good thing that your site has is the layout. Looking at all of the boards you have created, they seem to be fairly organized and seem to be easy to get around and know what goes where. As far as you can tell from the boards you have so far would show that the site is a general discussion board but as I mentioned above, you will want your theme & banner to show this, not the boards you have. Your posts seem to be very nicely organized into each appropriate section and you don't have too many boards per category and not too many nor too few categories but something I feel you could better to improve your site is add more boards. If you are going to run a general discussion board, you will want to have lots of boards due to the fact that there is so much to talk about on general discussion boards. And if you go and restrict your members & visitors about what they can discuss about by having a limited amount of boards, then this is something that will surely drive them away and make them not want to return. In regards to navigation, your site has a very straight forward navigation so getting around the site isn't difficult at all. So overall, I would just like you to keep in mind that running a general discussion board will take more then 9 boards for your members to discuss about things.
Statistics and Activity – (14 out of 20)
Although your site may have good numbers in regards to the statistics, that means nothing when the activity is lacking dramatically. Your site has almost 300 thousand posts with almost 2,300 members but when I look at the activity, you aren't as active as I thought you would have been. Just today you have only had 16 out of 2,280 members online. Meaning you have 2,264 members that haven't even logged into the site at all today. With that many members registered on your site, your main goal should be to make sure that they stay active and do everything you can to keep them around and keep them active. Because if you just let them leave and don't do anything about it, your site will not grow any faster. It will actually end up dying and once it dies, it will be hard to get it back up and running again. But looking at your most users online, you had a record of 131 users online on September 17th, 2013. Looking at this, that was almost a year ago. If you can get your members more active and keep them active, you can destroy that record. But overall, you may have good stats number wise but activity wise, they are drastically lacking.
Content – (11 out of 20)
I took some time to look into some of the threads that you have around your board to get a better feel for how the content of the site is and to be honest. It isn't the best but it isn't the worst. After looking around for a while, I would have to say, although you have a large quantity of posts & threads, they aren't quality. Sure, there are quality posts around there but they all aren't of high quality. The ones I see of high quality seem to be done by people who post for a living. You don't want to rely so heavily on these sort of people to make all the quality posts. You need to be the one making quality posts for the community because when your members see you do it, they will follow eventually. But if you as the owner post poor quality topics & replies, they will just follow and do the same which in the end will affect what others think of your site and will ultimately damage your site reputation & the professionalism of your site. But needless to say, your site does have a good quantity of posts, but you should really focus more on quality rather then quantity.
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism – (12 out of 20)
Lastly, let's go over the spelling, grammar, and professionalism of your site. Looking at some of the posts & topics that I read while reviewing your site, I found numerous spelling errors and grammatical errors. Although they may seem like minor things when looking at a site with such a high quantity of posts, there is still a need for spelling and grammar to be correct. Because when a few threads begin to have incorrect spelling and grammar, it will spread to other threads and it will just continue to spread. This is the sort of thing that ruins the professionalism of a site, when they don't have proper grammar or good spelling. But looking at the professionalism of your site, there are many flaws that are affecting how professional your site is. First one being the theme & domain. They don't stand out or show anything about what your site is about. The large advertisement that you have on the front page is very disturbing due to the fact it isn't a controlled one that you have manually added, it seems to just be one that google automatically inputs into your site as it does with all other free forum hosts. So if you would like to make your site look more professional, I would have to say your best bet is to get to work on most of those flaws that I have mentioned. The sooner they are fixed, the sooner your site will begin to prosper again.
Total Score - (56 out of 100)
Final Remarks:
This was surely a very challenging review to do to be honest. The site was very difficult to get used to and it took quite a while for me to actually figure out what it was all about. I spent several hours trying to review the site and get as much detail as I could and really try to figure out what you could improve on and when I did, I was glad I could help provide more details about them in the review. This site truly has a lot of things to be worked on before it is a truly successful site. But with hard work and determination, I feel that you are able to pull it off. I do hope you enjoyed the review.
Strengths:
- - Statistics Count
- Content (Quantity)
Weaknesses:
- - Site Theme
- Site Banner
- Site Domain
