Sorry for the delay in getting this posted up sapper.
In-Depth Review
Site Name:Talking Reds
Site Type: Sports
Age: 21 months
We find the overall appearance of your forum to be top notch. The banner is the first thing that catches the eye and it is very well designed with great contrast between the text color and the red. The menu and post icons fit in well with the overall design an are well designed as well. One suggestion would be make buttons for Twitter that fit better with the design, especially on the viewtopic.php page as the one that you have now dies not fit the design at all. The posting editor could be very confusing for those who are not familiar with Microsoft Word and its interface.
There is an average of 282 posts per member based on the total number of posts, topics and members. That is a great average on first sight, but once you look further you can see that only 16 members have more then 30 posts and only 9 of those have been online this month. We suggest trying to either bring these relatively inactive users back through email or other method, or deleting them after a prolonged period of time. The bulk of the posts and threads are made in the "Team Talk" category, obviously. And is there supposed to be any discussion in the "World Cup 2014" category since it's all threads? Overall, it holds up its activity and seems to be a highly visited forum, a good handful of users with over 1000 posts.
There's a lot of posts that are more informational than discussions. We felt this was a little lacking in some areas ESPECIALLY spelling and grammar. For example, just looking at the Transfer Gossip category, several of the threads had posts which were questionable in these terms ("absoulotely", "amn't", "will certain be", "a-lot", etc.) There's also a bit of inconsistency in the use of punctuation in board descriptions. Some descriptions use them, and some do not. Some don't have a description at all! Work on editing that and stick to one way or the other. You could also expand on the descriptions of some of the boards, for example, the "English Club Football" board description could be expanded to include some of the discussions that are not allowed about the rivals, if any.
The banner was the first thing that catches the eye. The gold against red is good as long as the shadow is there to make it stick out. Next was the countdown timer, which is a good addition to let your members know when the next game is going to be. The site makes it very clear though that it is about football and you instantly get the impression it's a sports forum, so we commend it on that aspect. It really isn't anything more than just a good looking forum about English football. Maybe add some more features that grab the guests and really contribute to the forum because I thought some things in there like the globe are a bit unnecessary.
With an Alexa rank of 8,979,377 and PR of 1/10, we can tell that SEO is a work in progress. However, it's missing a description on a Google search (says "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt") and not appearing at all using a Bing search. At this point, a forum should have a lot more sites linked in and you currently have 17, which is a start, though many of them are irrelevant sites. To start working on SEO, we suggest looking into using either the
SEO MOD or the tools provided by
phpBB SEO.
Words from the Reviewer
Your forum has an overall great design, with a suggestion for a new Twitter button on viewtopic.php. You also should look into ways to boost member interaction. One thing that you could do, if you have the money or donations to do so, would to run a competition with the prizes being team wear from shirts to hats or anything else that you think your members would be interested in. Maybe even FIFA 2013 if you have members who are gamers. There also needs to be some SEO work. The two links above should get you started with that. Also look for link directories just for English football forums and site and try submitting your forum to those to get some more relevant backlinks coming in as that will also help you grow in terms of page rank and Alexa rank.
Star Rating
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