Large Forum Review
First Impressions
The first word to come to my head is simplicity. Looking at General Talk for the first time, what I see is very simple yet right to the point. It is nothing bad, yet it can still use some work to invite visitors attention even more. While the layout and appearance is good, there really isn't something to stand out very much from half top of the forum for first-time visitors before doing any scrolling or clicking. Looking at the sections and number of posts, the activity looks rather good especially in general section as your forum name suggests. I also like the addition of the toolbar of the bottom. Some people may find it annoying but I think it is placed perfectly and useful for visitors or members to access important features.
(Score: 13/15)
Appearance
As mentioned a little bit above in previous section, your appearance and theme layout in general has both good and bad points.
Good point is that you keep everything simple and easy to navigate around. User friendly, if I may say. I like the quick menu at the top and the user bar at the bottom, it helps to find important links fast. The color of theme is also not a bad combination. You have lovely icons to represent the category/forum and there is a clear difference between forums with no new posts and those with new posts. The theme itself is calm and doesn't hurt the eyes.
However, there are other points I believe you can exploit more. To start with, let's begin at the very top: the logo and favicon. You have a nice banner resembling your website's name, but there is no icon or picture to accompany it. You have quite a large forum already there. Having a logo or icon or picture to represent yourself will be very useful, both to the site itself or to use it for advertising. You can use it for various events or occasions. For example, you can modify the icon a bit into your favicon. General Talk does not have a favicon yet; you're still using the default IPB's icon. Next is the icons for the navigation at the top of the page. You have the same icon representing "Forums", "Members", "GT Cash", and "Social" while you assign something different for "Calendar". You can say this is rather unfair for the other links. Get them each their own icon to make your header feels even more customized.
Another thing I noticed is that you put the option for member to turn the layout of the index page from the standard layout to a table-like layout. I'm not sure if this only applies to me, but when I tried it the bottom part overlap with the forum statistics information. You might want to give more space between them for better view.
For the color scheme, lately I have been reviewing sites using the color combination of blue and white a lot. Kind of sad because there are so many other colors out there not much used for combination. You may want to add more colors to make your forum more cheerful and dynamic. Your other theme is a bit dark because of the background but the body itself is still light. It might be a good idea to provide members with another black, dark theme so they can pick what's best for their eyes.
This might not be as important as the other details, but I feel like you can use the blank space in side widget column better. For general forums you can try to add a side widget featuring a picture, music, quote from members' literature or other popular literature. That helps to bring content in not only to what it looks from index page, but also provide more space for members to discuss things in the forum. You can link them to respective fields and encourage members to post and talk more. It acts good to the site double the amount, right?
(Score: 13/20)
Statistics and Activity
General Talk has a total of 6,627 posts and 248 members. Roughly dividing it, you have around 26 posts for every member. Quite a low number given when it started, but I can understand since you have just relaunched it. There are 33 members with no posts at all; that is a great achievement. However many members have low post count as well, mostly less than 10 posts. You have a job to try to encourage them and the other members to post more, through events or fun competitions at the forum. Taking out staff members' post count including you, which is around 1,300 posts, I think that is a great number that the rest is made by your members. The posts are spread well around the categories too. Keep up the good work.
(Score: 19/20)
Ratios
Ratio of the category and content looks good to me. I agree with your placement of the sections. "Music" section can fit both "Media" and "Creativity", just like how the sub-forums of "Creativity" category can fit in the category of "Media and Entertainment". Merging them might make it easier for members to browse. As for ratio of the staff members compared to the members, judging from the number along with so many members I say you can ask a help for one moderator to help you and your fellow administrator. However, given that not all 200 members are active, you two might just suffice. No problem here, just keep an eye for a moderator as the place goes bigger.
(Score: 10/10)
Content
Forum post wise, I think you have done well in trying to generate the content. Each section has a decent amount of topics and posts to keep it going steady with discussion. Several sections might need more help, especially literature section as it is very small. Grammar wise I don't really see anything wrong with the posts. In the descriptions of the sections, however, and the names of the forum, I suppose you can modify it to make it more unique and more inviting. You wrote this as the description of the news forum, for example: "
The board room, where it all happens. The news, the gossip. All that and more.". You repeated the word "Board Room" in the section name and the description. You can remove it as it is redundant. Also you can come up with a more interesting description for other sections as it might help to make them feel different despite their very common usage.
I'm not very sure of this as I'm not a native English speaker, but I have asked several people and still rather uncomfortable with your usage of word "opinonate" in the forum slogan. Slogan usually should be clear and simple to understand. Since General Talk is a general discussion forums and the members might be from various country whose native language is not English, using terms familiar with them would be nice. Even more since this is a slogan which also represents your site.
(Score: 16/20)
Navigation
The navigation is perfectly fine for me. I was helped with the user toolbar at the bottom of the forum which saves me by providing important links there. I also like how it is not too crowded or too distracting from the forum. No Privacy Policy or ToS spotted, and none needed. You may want to change the forum rules into a global announcement so members can find it wherever they go to.
(Score: 15/15)
Total Score
86/100
Final Remarks
General Talk is a great site. It is unfortunate it had to be inactive before, but you have what you need mostly for a new start. You only need to advertise more, and more importantly, add more content to it to keep members and visitors interested. General discussion forums have a lot of area to explore on, so all the best in that. Don't forget to let members participate in any plans you are doing for the site too to make them feel like part of the community.
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