Small Forum Review
First Impressions
To be honest my first impression was one of disappointment, the first thing that is apparent is the banner is totally wrong, and small details have been totally ignored. One of the easiest things to do is to construct a banner, putting the forum title to the far right just doesn’t work at all. For me the sidebar is on the wrong side, I feel it should be secondary to the main index, not the first thing you see.
The whole feeling is of clutter and poor organising, once you realise you can hide the sidebar, it looks a lot better.
Appearance
I’m not a great lover of dark themes, however when they are done right they can look great, in order to look great, things have to be right, details have to be right, you appear to have two backgrounds, they look alike, but on scrolling it is obvious they are two separate images.
The forum icons are being clipped, either by the space provided for them in the code, or by their size, either is easily rectified.
The menu at the top of the page is ugly, it would be much better to incorporate that into a navbar.
Your landing page is the forum index, yet you have a portal which is not being used, I fail to see why this would be, Portals are there to tease people in, yours is not being used to its full potential.
Even dark themes need some colour, splashes here and there can make them look a lot more inviting to new members.
Moving through the forums the theme changes dramatically to colours which are not good, luminous green text is not good on the eyes, and I am sure it would put people off joining.
Ratios and Statistics
With the activity you have, the number of staff you have is more than enough to control 47 registered members.
Some forums are a lot more popular than others, those with lower posts need to be made more active, concentrate some of your time in those.
Content
You have three forums which are a lot more active than the rest, some of the post counts in other forums are very low, the Star Wars forum hasn't had a single reply since July 2010.
This needs some immediate attention.
Final Remarks
You need to advertise a lot more if you are hoping to make the forum more popular, your Google rank at present is 0, which shows there is little or no activity. You claim the skin is custom, well in all honesty there are better free skins out there, some customisation is needed, and what you have needs to be improved, with a lot more attention paid to details (eg: the clipping of icons).
Your banner needs attention as well, with the FP cash you have, ask our graphics team to come up with something for you, the same goes for custom icon’s.
You need to look at your forum with a very critical eye, it needs attention to make it more popular.
The niche you are in is very exciting colourful one, your forum is not at all inspirational, at the moment.
This is what you are up against in your niche :
http://www.gamesforum.ca/
http://gamerbb.net/
http://xsgaming.com/forums/
Check out the styles, use of banners, and the number of members active.
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