GameHandout
Review by PoH
First Impressions
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My first impressions of Game Handout were rather average. When I first come upon your forum, I'm greeted by a decent header and a really good favicon. Something that takes some real points off here is that huge blue text block above your first category. It's a really cool idea to have a block of text in your header with some basic information about your forum, but the blue doesn't look very good at all. I'd highly recommend that you change the color of either the text, or the background of the block to something a little different (especially with the background of the block) to something softer that would fit in to your theme a little better.
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Average
Design Quality
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You have a really good theme that's responsive, and that's really easy on the eyes. The one thing you could do to make your design significantly better is to add forum forum specific icons for each one of your boards. If you look at how FP, and most other forums have it, they're all unique to the specific forum. If you do something like that, it adds a lot of originality to your forum, while at the same time shows how much work you've put into your forum because everything will be unique to specific boards.
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Good
Site Statistics
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Your forum's statistics are OK. They're not anything especially impressive, but they're not bad either. You have good statistics and daily posts in your core areas, but everywhere else looks pretty inactive. The off topic section, especially on a gaming forum, is highly underrated. It's pretty easy to get activity in these areas as well. Posting topics about sports, politics, and other random interests isn't hard at all, but it doesn't sacrifice quality at all; but it's not hard to make these types of topics. Regarding your exchange area, it's also pretty inactive, even more so than the off-topic area. I'd highly recommend you, and your staff members attempt to do things like make gaming YouTube videos, and attempt to recruit some members to be in these videos with your section on the forum.
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Average
Originality
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Gaming communities very rarely have any originality at all. However, your's breaks the mold to a degree. While you're not highly original, you've at least made a really good attempt at being original by giving away games, as well as a blog. Specifically about the blog, it seems to seap unused potential. Since you own a video game forum, you're obviously playing video games a lot. You should definitely use this exact same interest to benefit your blog. Here's what I mean: how many video games do you play every week? Think if you spent thirty minutes reviewing one, or even two of these video games weekly. You would be able to have quite a few video games reviews in your blog archive. While you've been doing a good job at this so far, you can definitely keep it up and improve your blog significantly.
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Average
Site Structure
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One of the things that will drive away viewers very quickly is poor navigation. Your navigation for the forum is good; I would even dare to say great. You have a category for everything needed, haven't outdone it with the categories, and all of your categories are at least semi active (and as I said in the "Site Statistics" category, it wouldn't be hard at all to get all of then active).
The major thing I see is on your blog's navigation: or lack of. There is really no navigation at all on your blog it seems. While it's awesome that you can get other people to write for your blog, you need to do a better job with navigation. You already have a sidebar on the right side, and you already have a tab system which means you have the framework for a navigation system. If you were to add a search type function on the right sidebar for the tags that you already have, it would greatly improve navigation. It's so much easier to just click a button if I'm looking for something related to Mario gaming, instead of having to scroll all the way down to find an article about Mario Gaming.
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Poor
Spelling & Professionalism
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If this was solely about spelling and grammar, you'd grade excellent. However, while your spelling and grammar is very good, your professionalism isn't at all. It's completely understandable that a gaming community won't have the same level of professionalism that other forums might have, but some errors here look really bad. First off, it really bugs me that you have a bunch of emotion codes, but without an emotion to go with them (example "
😀" should be "
😀 "). It really does look a lot better like that than it does currently to have your emotions show up.
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Poor
Final Remarks
GameHandout is an awesome community so far. There aren't many major issues, and you've laid a very good groundwork to your forum. If you improve a few things around the edges, and keep moving, you'll do well. Best of luck in the future.
Biggest like about the website?: The theme is awesome, I really like it a lot.
Biggest dislike about the website?: I cannot stand the smiles not showing up. If you want to use them, use them. If you don't, don't!
What could I do to make you (the Reviewer) join my website?: Keep growing and have the admins as active as possible.
Your Score
