PromoBB
Full Review by Red Herring
Scoring:
First Impressions & Appearance – (6 out of 20)
"A functionless welcome page? Strange." These were amongst my first thoughts when I originally entered your website, PromoBB, for the first time. The link I had been directed to revealed this pondering sight to me and I thought to myself why you had chosen to make this addition. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a home page of sorts, or even a CMS if it were warranted; but such an extension requires a purpose, a purpose that this welcome page lacks.
To be frank, it's quite pointless. The only function it serves is using a sizable blue button that takes you to the forum itself. Is it unsound to simply use the forum itself, or if you must, a forum portal? The welcome page only manages to serve as a slight pretty distraction from entering the forum proper, and it's not particularly pretty. The background is one half of an overstretched screenshot of your forum itself and one half blank white empty space with a couple of empty advertisement banners and copyright branding; neither halves manage to astound and poorly contrast each other.
If you're going to have a home page or welcome page, there should be a reason to use it. Most are not going to spend more than a grand total of two minutes of their life on this page when the only purpose it serves are to enter your forums. Try having it direct to various sections of PromoBB, add a news feed, list your services, or something so that it's not so impractical.
I will not be counting this welcome page as part of my score, it is not technically part of your forums, after all, but I still felt this was important to mention. Moving on.
Leaving behind the perplexing welcome page, I found myself quite pleased upon entry to the forums themselves. I was greeted with a simple, but attractive design that was easy and cordial to my sensitive eyes. The logo itself managed to be minimalistic and still retain a dazzling bit of effectual flair that blended brilliantly with the blue header. The forum index maintained a lovely display of forum blocks with perfectly organized text information and excellent color blending. Although, I was a bit turned off at how only a limited number of sub-forums were displayed. "Blog Releases, Forum Contains, News Lock Up, and 1 more". It's really inconvenient for those who desire easy access to a particular sub-forum when it's not displayed on the index. I also feel that the footer's advertising spots are a bit oddly placed next to the quick links. It would be more enticing if the advertisement spots were lined up with the link boxes themselves; but these are rather minor complaints.
There is one glitch on thread-display, however, and it's much too blatant to ignore.
I believe it's obvious, but the "Download Submissions" and "Achievements" rows have melded together, and I'll often find that this information extends into the posts themselves. It should definitely be fixed as soon as possible. Other than that, though, it's a fairly delightful design. I've seen far more impressive themes, but this one satisfies me quite well.
However, you requested that I score this section based on your "Red Delight" theme. I will honor this request, but the result will not be a blithe one.
If I had named this design, it would not be "Red Delight", rather it would be "Horrid Peach." There is no "red" to be found in this theme. There is peach, grey and black, but no red; and I honestly have to say that I've never seen such a poor color contrast before from such a serious attempt. The peach borders on the forum index look absolutely abysmal mixed with the shades of grey found in the forumbit's background. The header is boring with the only point of interest being the decent CSS effects that occur when hovering over a navigation element. Otherwise, it's merely a logo and menu squashed between two very dull grey bars; with a
blue logo in an environment completely lacking of blue. The pattern repeating in the background might have been interesting in a different theme, but it's completely out of place in this one; serving only to accentuate the already dreadful design.
This is one of the few occasions where I honestly can't offer any advice for improvement. In my opinion, it would be easier to simply scrap the whole "Red Delight" theme and design a new one; or better yet, simply stick with "Project7" and iron out the few inherent flaws it contains. If I weren't scoring this section based on "Red Delight", my score would be 13/20.
Site Layout – (13 out of 20)
Questionable welcome pages aside, I had no issue with navigating PromoBB. Considering your forums use MyBB, therefore using stock MyBB navigation, I certainly shouldn't have had any problems navigating site functions...and I didn't. We're making excellent progress already.
When it comes to navigating the forums themselves, I found myself amidst a professionally laid-out forum index. There was the standard community and announcements category, followed by categories unique to PromoBB, ending with general discussion and advertisements. It's a very tried and tested index formula widely used for a reason: it works. I certainly have no complaints about you using this formula for PromoBB. No venture has been made into the exciting, but it functions very well, and that's all anyone asks for.
If I have to bring up any criticism, it would be of an aspect I mentioned in the last section. Showing only a limited number of sub-forums on the index is something of an inconvenience to users who want to access sub-forums that
aren't displayed on the index. There's only three instances where your forums do this, but it's still a bit jarring. Anyone desiring access will need to first access that forum, then select the sub-category. Much like your welcome page, it serves only as a hassle. One that should be alleviated.
Beyond that, there really isn't much else I can say on the matter. The organization of your index is pristine, even if it's not adventurous or unique. The same can be said when it comes to navigating functions.
Good work.
Statistics and Activity – (8 out of 20)
Though I'm certain there have been periods of time where PromoBB was completely or almost completely dead, you have managed to maintain quite a bit of longevity. PromoBB has existed since back in
2009, in a time where Forum Promotion was considered young; having an age of only two years. This gives PromoBB itself an age of
nearly four years. For non-commercial websites with a relatively smaller community, this is quite impressive.
Unfortunately, you do not have the activity nor the statistics to back it up. Over the course of these four years, you've garnered a grand total of 15,000+ posts and 576 members. For a website that has been on the web for quite awhile compared to other smaller communities, this is a rather paltry sum. I have seen worse, but it's still quite insignificant. To make a comparison, a certain general discussion community I know of has an administrator with
three times as many posts as your entire forum, with 21x more for the entirety of its post count. This community is older than yours by only two or three months. It's also rather successful, making it a bit of an unfair comparison, but I hope you see my point here.
The second issue is the activity itself. I wouldn't say that PromoBB is on life-support, but it's getting to that point. There are currently only a handful of active members visiting your community. And while on first glance, the index appears to be relatively active, it is betrayed upon further exploration of the forums. Posts tend to be few and far between within most of them, with only a few exceptions.
This definitely needs to be alleviated. Activity is the most essential part of a forum, for without its community, a forum serves no purpose.
In order to solve this, I feel you need to be a more active participant within your community. While it's true that you are a driving force behind it, you haven't put as much care into it as a small community requires. When your active userbase consists of a small handful, it's up to the owner himself to ensure discussion is being made until the community has stabilized enough to walk on its own. Post a four to six topics everyday and encourage your staff to participate. A forum can maintain life by its owner and staff alone, if they put in the effort.
Work hard and put some effort into the advertising front. That general discussion community I mentioned earlier had a truly caring owner that posted numerous discussions on his forum each day
(and still does) and went to just about each and every forum advertising website he could find and milked them for all they were worth. Today, it maintains 60+ daily active members, 320,000+ posts and a continuous stream of new members. If you put the effort in, I'm sure you could achieve similar results.
Content – (6 out of 20)
Out of all the aspects of PromoBB, I'd have to say "Content" is where it suffers most. More specifically, "lack of content" is where it suffers most. There simply isn't anything unique or interesting to keep the users themselves interested, and I'll explain why that is.
I believe it goes without saying that "PromoBB" is a community catered to webmaster discussion and providing other websites and communities with services and resources to assist in their success. It's a genre with a noble purpose for those who genuinely seek to help and support their fellow webmasters. However, there are also many out there who feel that the promotion genre of communities would be an easy way to garner activity, due to the belief that users will flock to a community that allows for free advertising. Therefore, there's quite a number of promotion websites out there. Any website seeking to benefit from the promotion genre needs to offer unique services or advantages to offset the sheer number of their counterparts already on the web.
Your promotion community, PromoBB, offers
nothing new to that table. In fact, it's more accurate to say that your promotion board
lacks even the basic services offered by most other promotion boards; such as posting packages or review services. You don't particularly need them, but their absence is not alleviated by any new or interesting services. The most you have is a more categorized database of resources, but most websites worth their weight also have such databases in their forum index. Your own resource database is also almost completely bare. There is a total of four downloads available in your resource database so it barely registers as one. Your forum-oriented databases are rather limited as well.
I mean no offense, but why would I make use of PromoBB when I can get the same services and more from numerous other promotion boards, often ones with more fulfilling and helpful databases? The only reason I could think of is perhaps an additional advertisement thread, which, admittedly, is always worth it due to the backlinks; but there is nothing available that would make me want to stay and participate. I can get the same kind of discussion, better services and better resources from your counterparts.
If you want to draw in a larger userbase, get creative. Consider new innovative ways to service your membership and their websites. Expand upon your databases, there's numerous other kinds of resources that webmasters would find essential or helpful
(a coding database, for example.)
Expand on your content, and you just might expand on your community. Good luck.
Spelling/Grammar & Professionalism – (15 out of 20)
When it came to grammar, I wasn't paying too much attention. Why? Because there wasn't anything particularly wrong with it. In fact, everything was really quite pleasant to read. So, much like PromoBB's layout, I really don't have a whole lot to criticize or talk about; but I shall give it my best analysis nonetheless.
If anything is deserving of praise, it would definitely be your forum index. While I was suffering from the design of "Horrid Peach", your forum descriptions remained the one thing that were still genuinely pleasing to my eyes. They were
excellent; being descriptive and written with elegant levels of flair, as though the descriptions themselves were excited about their topic. It's always a pleasure when I encounter descriptions so well-written, as I encounter a surprisingly
(and sadly) few amount of them. The only negative thing I could say is that some are perhaps a
little too long in length, which might have a negative impact on users who suffer from lack of attention span, but overall,
very nice.
Sadly, this wasn't always reflected when it came to your site-related posts; announcements and the like. Any announcements made tended to be incredibly bare-boned with none of the interesting flair in the forum descriptions to be found. Don't get me wrong, they were concise and certainly straight to the point, but I felt a bit disappointed reading them; a disappointment that probably
won't be shared by your userbase, but nonetheless.
Everything else was in tip-top shape. You answered any feedback questions from your users with concise detailed information, stickied threads and application threads were often quite professional and everything was pristine. Excellent work.
Total Score - (48 out of 100)
Final Remarks:
Don't let the final score of my review give you the wrong impression. PromoBB is not a
bad website. It has the makings to be a wonderful promotion and webmasters' discussion board. Everything is pleasant, professional, sleek and it has an excellent default design with an exceptional owner. The real issue here is that it's completely
lacking in areas that it
really shouldn't be lacking in.
Of course, I'm referring to the
activity and
especially the
content. The activity is clearly in need of work and tender-loving care from the administration front. There's simply not enough members and activity to support PromoBB's ambitions. However, activity can be forgiven somewhat as it's not always dictated by the administrator. What truly needs some attention is the inadequate amount of content that PromoBB has to offer. And I'm not referring to the resource database, as that can be alleviated once you grow in userbase.
What PromoBB really needs is services or other content that sets it apart from all its numerous brethren out there in the web. Many of them set out to try and offer more on that front, PromoBB almost seems to want to offer
less. There are only really two services really offered by the site's administration. Social networking and a few advertisement slots
(which cost money!) Save for those that are desperate for extra backlinks or others that respect the owner, there is absolutely nothing offered by PromoBB that can't be found elsewhere; which is a serious issue for a promotion board, because the services are the main attraction for a userbase.
If the lack of content is alleviated, however, and its flaws ironed out, then I feel PromoBB could be an excellent promotion community with an active userbase. The fact that it's lived for four years already proves that it's not willing to die off that easily. So with a little effort on your end as an owner, your success is quite likely.
And with that, I wish you the best of luck.
Strengths:
- - Project7 Theme Aesthetics
- Forum Descriptions
- Layout
Weaknesses:
- - Red Delight Theme Aesthetics
- Statistics & Activity
- Lack of Content
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