Languavel
Review by Giorgios
First Impressions
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When I first come to Languavel, I'm greeted by a very nice theme that instantly assists me with grasping the niche of your forum, which is really important. You've got about 15 seconds to really get a user interested before they lose interest and close out your forum. However, I find myself straining to decipher some of the text found around the forums due to style of the text. I'll go over this more in the Design aspects of the review, but this was something that followed me throughout the general overview of the forum. One other quick aspect that I noticed was that some of the forum descriptions were a bit long, and some of them could easily be trimmed down to quickly cover what that specific forum is about. I'll also touch on that later in the review.
For my first impressions of Languavel, while I was still enticed by your forum, I was hoping to have had a better first impression.
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Average
Design Quality
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Like I mentioned before, I like the middle part of the theme as far as the airplane and the Eiffel Tower as well various other travel aspects. Even with most custom themes, they still tend to lack various aspects of the forum niche. For example if you have a video game forum, you can have an Xbox 360 as a backdrop in the theme. So kudos to you on going that extra mile. As I mentioned above though, I'm finding it a bit difficult to read some of the text throughout the forum. On the logo at the top of the page, the slogan part seems to run together and the text looks choppy. Going down to the forum descriptions sections, I'm not a fan of the italicized gray text. With such a light color and the formatting from it being italicized, it's a bit of a strain on the eyes. I would say removing the italics would be best, and then bolding the gray to make it easier to read, or possibly changing the font color maybe to black.
Additionally I noticed that under the Interviews tab, the forum icon for the Languavel Member Spotlight is broken and is displaying an error.
And while I'm on the topic of forum icons, I'm noticing something that while some may not notice, it's something that seems out of place. In the Language and Travel Interviews sections, the forum icons are incredibly small compared to the forum icon of Travel News and of the other forum sections. I would look into finding new forum icons for those two forums to maintain uniformity with the matching sizes across the board.
Finally, I'm not sure if this is an add on or this was added into the theme by the designer, but either way, it was something I wanted to touch on. The tabs for the various forum sections you have don't flow with the theme that you have. While you've got this flowing mix of blue and white throughout the forum, the tabs are a simple plain gray color with no flair. While they're not always an important aspect since they're there for navigation purposes, I would see about trying to design them to have them go together with the theme.
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Average
Site Statistics
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Your statistics for your forum are really good. You've got over 10,000 posts with 219 members which isn't bad. Your Top 5 posters are all Staff Members is another good thing as it shows that your Staff are posting and maintaining great activity to get the community flowing with content. One thing sadly though I noticed is in the Languages area. All the forums with the exception of one forum have not had any posts made in them within the past three days. When this happens, it's good to look at the forums and see which ones you can cut out if activity just isn't there. But with your case of the language forums being a key part, see if you could merge them into a central forum. So if for example the Japanese and Chinese forums didn't work out, then you could merge them into a Languages of Asia forum. It all depends on how the forums go as far as activity.
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Good
Originality
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While there are countless travel and language forums out there, your forum combines the two of them together in a nice blend. While looking at what the niche offers, you've got these massive forums such as TripAdvisor that are called a community, but they severely lack the community feel. You've got more so of a cluttered and all over the place feeling with everyone posting and it's not direct like forums should be. With your forum being obviously smaller, you've got a great opportunity to maintain your community feel while continuing to grow. One biggest thing is not letting go of staff and member interaction. You see this countless times on large forums to where the Staff lose interest in talking and working with the members, and they remain hidden in the private staff forums. Another unique thing would be to have raffles of merchandise at periodic times throughout the year with your logo customized to match specific season or holiday. As you continue to grow, member retention is key because while it's difficult to grow into a large forum, it doesn't take much to topple it. Having these fun contests and such to allow members to win your logo on merchandise is not only a free win for members, it's also easy promotion for you.
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Good
Site Structure
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I had mentioned in my opening part of the review in the first impressions about the forum descriptions. While they're unique and not the cookie cutter descriptions you can always see on one forum after another, some of them are extremely lengthy and could do with some trimming down. The Chinese forum description is one such example:
Did you know that Chinese is not only spoken in China but also in Taiwan and Singapore? By far Chinese is one of the most difficult languages to learn - are you up to the challenge?
While you're wanting to be unique and make the descriptions fun and not sound boring, it doesn't work out when the descriptions are a bit long. I would sit down and pick apart the descriptions and narrow it down to what you're wanting to have on display on the forum index, and then perhaps adding the rest into the forum rules section like a language information box when members go into that specific forum.
Something weird that I believe I mentioned before was the last tab displayed on the forum index which is the Staff Hub. It doesn't really serve a purpose to display that to non staff other than stating that a staff forum does exist on the forum. One thing that you could do though is place the VIP forum in there and display it to all members while hiding all the topics in the forum unless they donate. This is a great way to motivate people to donate to the forum by showing a perk that they gain.
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Good
Spelling & Professionalism
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The two grammatical issues that I spotted right off the bat were in the Forum stats section at the bottom of the forum. Most thanks and most reputations seem to be an issue from within the writer of the addon, however it can easily be changed. While those aren't a terrible mistake and nor are they on your part, I would fix them as they are an error regardless.
This is more so on the professional side of the review for this next part. I went through all the various tabs on the top of the forum and then I noticed that you had a Chat page. When I went to click on it, it just took me to a blank white page. I'm not sure if the page is broken on the technical side or if the chat has been removed altogether. On either end, it's always good to remove these types of things from the public forum since it can be frustrating to some members with things not working.
As I scanned through your rules, it comes to on both aspects. As crazy as it may sound, the rules thread comes off as intimidating in that it just seems like a huge wall of text that I will have to scan through in the event of a violation I've been charged with or just overall knowledge to avoid breaking the rules. It doesn't look professional to have the rules in that manner to where it just throws it at you and the member would have to hunt down a certain aspect. I like the idea on how you've given rule updates in replies to the rule thread. What could be done is break the rules down into multiple replies to make it easier for reading.
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Average
Final Remarks
Languavel certainly has the unique aspect on it from all sides of the forum. You've got a great theme and your forum sections cover most of the larger languages and aspects of travel that is brought up. The biggest things for improvement are aesthetics and general tweaking of the theme, which in turn will only help you in the long run with the community. And finally, I would really look into capitalizing on both aspects of your forum by any way you can. Word of mouth will certainly be your greatest help with your forum niche, so look for ways to slip a good word in. All the best with your forum!
Your Score
