Name of Site: Cmt Sports Forum Site Genre: Sports Site URL:http://www.cmtsportsforum.com/ Type of Review: Quick Opening Date: March 1, 2013 Additional Notes: N/A
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Loyal member base.
One thing I have admired about your forum for a long time is how you seem to have a close-knit, small group of members who show up and post from day to day. Even if it's only four or five at this point, that's more than a lot of forums have, so well done. I'm glad to see that they were willing to stick around after the complete restart, which I feel was actually turned out to be a decent move, even though it was pretty risky. It's a whole lot easier to provide content when you know that you'll have participation on threads, no matter what. You've probably done this, but make sure that you have them invite their friends. It's interesting that I've never seen some of your regular around on forums before. Most of the time, you see the same people on every forum, which is a major killer for a lot of websites. Nice job on breaking out of the box. If you can double or triple your active members, which shouldn't be too difficult at this point, you'll be well on your way to the activity level you had before. 🙂
Dedication is shown.
Before I get started on this point, I've really noticed how you tend to avoid the major pitfalls of most webmasters, and I'd like to commend you on that. Someone's definitely been doing their homework! Anyway, if anyone was to have a five minute conversation with you, they would be able to tell that you really have a passion for sports. I can't stress enough how impossible it is to run a forum about something you don't care about. Visiting your forum, you can see tons of threads about sports news, and other discussions that are always relevant, which is awesome! It's nice to see that you follow your niche that closely, and it really tells me that you won't get bored of your own forum anytime soon. Related to that, you also have the most posts on your forum by a long shot, and the next two members after you are staff members. Like I've said before, leading by example is the only way to get your staff to share the same dedication as you do. Keep up the good work!
Weaknesses:
Design.
Let me start off by saying that your design is not horrible. Some areas are excellent; for example, your main forum layout below the header is excellent. I also enjoy the postbit, and forum display areas. However, I feel like your navigation areas is a huge weak spot. I'm not a fan of the text used in the buttons at all, and I feel like they are pretty clunky. The text is giant, and I don't really think it needs to be. Instead of reconstructing the buttons via Photoshop, have you considered switching to CSS buttons? They're pretty easy to make, and they will be much easier to change via classes, as opposed to making six separate buttons, and editing each of them every time you want to change. As a plus, they will help reduce HTTP requests, and make your site load tons faster. Also, while I understand that most people have monitors large enough to display the navigation on one single line, there are still a decent chunk of users who do not. I am one of those, unfortunately, and when the button get bunched up and shift to two lines, it doesn't look good. So, in addition to making the buttons smaller, I think you could stand to remove a few. Namely, I would get rid of the Arcade link, and the link to the Ultimate Points page. Come to think of it, the Medals link doesn't really need to be in the header. Instead, you could add a small footer, and put the links down there. It would be nice to add a footer anyway, the bottom of your forum feels a little naked. Briefly, I'd like to suggest that you get a new set of postbit buttons. Especially when viewed from the private messages page, the custom ones you have do not match the default buttons, and it looks a bit tacky. Once again, consider CSS buttons! 😛 Other than that, your theme is pretty nice. It matches the "playfulness" that should be associated with sports, and the logo does a good job of planting your name in your visitor's brain.
Subforum layout.
I'm really getting nitpicky here, but honestly, there aren't a lot of things majorly wrong with your forum, which is a plus. A few things that I would like to see changed about your subforums are: a change of the board descriptions, and the introduction of another subforum. I understand that consistency is a good thing to have, but I personally feel like your board descriptions are too similar under the Sports category. Each of them are good descriptions on their own, but when they are basically repeated five times in a row, it can be a little annoying to some people. I also think there is room for a little more discussion on your forum, about some different topics. Two that you could easily incorporate would be something regarding Sports Preparation, and maybe even something to do with Sports Headlines. Going through some of your other subforums, I noticed that those two topics are pretty prevalent. With your current statistics, I wouldn't normally recommend adding more forums, but I think in your case, you could definitely pull it off.
Final Remarks:
You've done a decent job restarting the forum, which, admittedly, was a task I thought was going to be near impossible. With some targeted advertising and some design tweaks, you will definitely have a much improved website, and I hope that I've helped you think of a few new ideas! Good luck!
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