Small Forum Review
First Impressions
My first impression is that the skin has nothing to do with poker or card games, whilst the chosen banner font/logo is good, I’m not too sure where the purple and brown colour scheme fits in. I suppose I was expecting an image containing a hand of cards and some betting chips etc.
I’m also very perplexed as to a brick wall ?, I would have thought a card table effect more appropriate.
Appearance
The first thing that is apparent is the lack of a Favicon, this can be solved by using one of the many favicon generators you can find online, the browser tab also shows .eu, there’s no real reason for this, it’s better to leave the .eu out.
On to the main forum, I’ve already expressed my concerns over the skin, but it’s good to see you have some customisation in your forum icons.
The forum comes across as very plain, and almost blog like, if this is intended then I have to say it works, even the posts that have been made appear more like comments, this could put people off from joining. My other feeling is that you actually only have the one forum icon, utilising the other suits to show read/unread/locked, would be an idea and it would add a little more colour.
Ratios and Statistics
This is very difficult to comment on as the forum is so new, I can see that you have an admin and a moderator, that should be sufficient for the time being, you need to see a lot more activity before increasing your staffing levels.
Content
Again this is a difficult one to comment on because there is so little of it, I get the impression you are trying to build the content before a full launch.
I can see that you have a forum for actual games, now I’m no poker expert, but somewhere there must be documentation on classic poker games, these would be a good focus if you could find them.
In my opinion you need to have at least one thousand posts before going on a full out launch.
Final Remarks
I would seriously look around for a different skin, you need one that shouts poker:
http://www.cardschat.com/
http://www.pokerforums.org/online-poker/
http://www.twoplustwo.com/
http://pokerforums.fulltiltpoker.com/
This are the top four hits when you google “poker forums online”, I’m not saying you should copy them, but the banners and skins should give you some inspiration.
You need to sort out a favicon, either by using a generator, or asking our graphics team to make one for you, changing the browser tab is cosmetic, but that too needs to be done.
As for the skin, there are plenty of free phpBB3 skins out there that I feel would be more suitable to the genre, you could always invest in a custom theme, but this is an expensive solution for a new forum.
The links I have given should also give you an idea of some new discussion forums, and trends that could be included, look to see which ones they are busiest in, then use that to make your forum more appealing.
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