MeadRecipes - Review please

[Xyphien]

Recipes

meadrecipes.com

This is NOT mainly a forum. Despite it being Xenforo, it's a recipe website. As the name suggests MeadRecipes. So I'm asking as a website, and not a forum. I'm aware the content on the forum is dead, and I'm not too focused on that at the moment. I just want to make sure everything looks good from the recipe side of things. I'm using an addon that wasn't meant for recipes and just images so I'm trying to get feedback on how it looks as someone who would be viewing it for mead recipes.

There's literally no one on the website as of now. It's just me, so I need more topics, posts, etc. before promotion. I'm just wondering how the site functions, looks, on top of how the recipe section is. Keep in mind, this will be for people that know mead, and not Xenforo so the basic style is fine imo.

Thanks in advance!

 

[USHost247]

First Impressions

My first impression upon visiting the Forum is that there are only two articles and it goes directly to the recipes tab in the forum. There's a navigation menu on the left with many zeros which shows me that the recipes are completely blank in most categories. I would actually recommend having the domain go to the forums tab versus the recipes tab, at least until there is content.

Appearance

For the appearance of the forum, the logo distracts me from the rest of the website just due to the size of the logo. I believe the size of the logo could be a lot smaller and serve the same purpose. For the theme of the forum, I get the feeling that there has been little effort put into the forum because there is no custom theme and there are only a few categories and bare minimum content with no clear guidelines on anything about the forum.

Statistics and Activity

As far as the statistics and activity goes, the forum is majorly lacking in content. I noticed a topic stating that the website is live as of today's date but the forum is lacking any type of content for your members to actually reply to. This can have a major negative effect on your forum from a guest view. I would work on generating topics for guests to read and entice them to join.

Navigation

I must say, the navigation is the high point of your forum. I can easily access most of the stuff I would/should. I find it easy to navigate back to your forums main index, which is always good, and it is easy to access all aspects of the forum.

Final Remarks

A forum in need of a helping hand to get it going to get resources, recipes, guides, and content. I would recommend forming up some forum rules and guidelines on what is expected of your community members and begin working on the forum tutorials since that is a forum near the top. If you want content and resources to have a community, you need to let your community know what you expect of them and how to get their recipes added.

 

[Xyphien]

First Impressions

My first impression upon visiting the Forum is that there are only two articles and it goes directly to the recipes tab in the forum. There's a navigation menu on the left with many zeros which shows me that the recipes are completely blank in most categories. I would actually recommend having the domain go to the forums tab versus the recipes tab, at least until there is content.

Appearance

For the appearance of the forum, the logo distracts me from the rest of the website just due to the size of the logo. I believe the size of the logo could be a lot smaller and serve the same purpose. For the theme of the forum, I get the feeling that there has been little effort put into the forum because there is no custom theme and there are only a few categories and bare minimum content with no clear guidelines on anything about the forum.

Statistics and Activity

As far as the statistics and activity goes, the forum is majorly lacking in content. I noticed a topic stating that the website is live as of today's date but the forum is lacking any type of content for your members to actually reply to. This can have a major negative effect on your forum from a guest view. I would work on generating topics for guests to read and entice them to join.

Navigation

I must say, the navigation is the high point of your forum. I can easily access most of the stuff I would/should. I find it easy to navigate back to your forums main index, which is always good, and it is easy to access all aspects of the forum.

Final Remarks

A forum in need of a helping hand to get it going to get resources, recipes, guides, and content. I would recommend forming up some forum rules and guidelines on what is expected of your community members and begin working on the forum tutorials since that is a forum near the top. If you want content and resources to have a community, you need to let your community know what you expect of them and how to get their recipes added.

Thanks for the detailed response. I'm currently working on adding more recipes right now. The site, though it is using Xenforo will be focused primarily on the recipe aspect which is why it's linked to the recipes and not the actual forum. As for everything else I'll be making more posts, and content throughout the weekend on top of looking for a theme. I wanted the website up, so I did in fact put little time into designing it as you stated. I just don't know what vision I'd like for a mead brewing website in the terms of Style/theme. If you have any suggestions on that, that'd be amazing to hear as well 🙂

Thanks once again for the helpful information and detailed review of the website 🙂

Edit: I'm hard at work finding recipes to place on the website. Though most of them are links to other sites, it's still a benefit imo than having to find everything yourself.

Edit: @ChrisGrigg mind checking it out again and telling me how it looks?

 

[USHost247]

Thanks for the detailed response. I'm currently working on adding more recipes right now. The site, though it is using Xenforo will be focused primarily on the recipe aspect which is why it's linked to the recipes and not the actual forum. As for everything else I'll be making more posts, and content throughout the weekend on top of looking for a theme. I wanted the website up, so I did in fact put little time into designing it as you stated. I just don't know what vision I'd like for a mead brewing website in the terms of Style/theme. If you have any suggestions on that, that'd be amazing to hear as well 🙂

Thanks once again for the helpful information and detailed review of the website 🙂

Edit: I'm hard at work finding recipes to place on the website. Though most of them are links to other sites, it's still a benefit imo than having to find everything yourself.

Edit: @ChrisGrigg mind checking it out again and telling me how it looks?

I absolutely believe you are headed in the right direction! Logo looks a lot better and the theme is on topic! The only thing I would change is the full transparent categories on the forum index. Good to see content is being added!

 

[Page]

Do you even have a home page? all I see is jugs of recipes and nothing else. It doesn't have that wow factor and also recipes aren't saying what they are.

 

[Xyphien]

Do you even have a home page? all I see is jugs of recipes and nothing else. It doesn't have that wow factor and also recipes aren't saying what they are.

The website is called Mead Recipes, the recipes section is the home page. As for the recipes not saying what they are do you mean outside of hovering over them? Or clicking on them? If it's the first, I'm trying to figure out how to display that information permanently but I have no idea how to do that lol.