Pre-Launch Review
Site Name: PvT Tracy's Neck of the Woods
Site Type: Gaming Forum
Age: ~2 days
Appearance
The theme of the forum is quite good although simple. At least the banner and favicon are ready and reflect the idea of gaming forum much. Nice work with different images in front of each forum. For forums in "Banner Share" category, they all have the same image. Strange for me since other forums can have it different so you need to work on those too. The buttons and icons used inside the forums are simple too although different from the usual standard buttons. Good enough, though you can try to add small icons or images in those buttons which are related to gaming to give stronger touch of the niche of your forum. The post layout is already good, I like how poster's information will be centered following the height of the post box. For the footer, you only have no-new-post and locked-forum icons displayed, no new-post icon is shown. Also the Norton button looks out of place for me, a bit too below the bottom line of the last black box of the index page.
Layout
The layout is rather strange. Hard for me to actually tell the focus of your forum by looking at the layout. A very strong aura of gaming forum, but you only have one category and three forums for it. On the other side you have so many general/off-topic sections. I'm also not sure for what you have 'Virus Warnings' at the first category. If it's going to be used to report virus warnings from computers, a feedback section would have sufficed. 'Affiliates' also usually means displaying images and links to other websites in your forum, not in form of threads like what you have, but it's your choice. I would advise you to decrease the number of off-topic forums and add more on-topic area. For example "Recipe Exchanges" can simply be put inside "General Chat". Focus is very important for new forums as one of start-off pillars.
First Impressions and Interest
First impression of your forum was confusing. Even after venturing to the front page (the blog part), I was still confused. I am not a gamer to begin with, thus understanding this all was rather hard for me. I couldn't relate "Pvt_Tracy's neck of the woods" to anything. Looking at your forums, you do have gaming section but the rest are quite general. I think you should specify what your site and forum is about, especially from name and descriptions in banner or any part of the forum. It's hard for visitors to get interested if they can't truly understand the purpose of the forum/website.
Content
I can't comment much on content as there are hardly anything presented at the forum at this moment. From my understanding your forum is about gaming, yet the gaming sections are now empty and the other posts are located at off-topic sections. There are many gaming-related forums and websites out there so you should be careful with the content you provided; must be something unique to be able to draw members in. For example, news, reviews, tutorials/tips/tricks, walkthroughs, giveaways, and so on. Grammar wise you don't have rules thread and no forum descriptions as well, but from your posts the grammar is pretty good. When you decided to post forum rules and descriptions, keep up the good grammar to show professionalism.
Words from the Reviewer
The forum is still very young and still need a lot of work. One thing you need to take note very carefully is related to the niche of your forum. Niche decides on how you should place the layout of the forum and what kind of content you need to add. Decide on this properly, then work on both to show off that niche you choose with various elements related to it; appearance is only a support here. Work on those and you'll be more ready to fight the competition with other forums in your niche.
Star Rating
After reading your review, please click here to rate your review.
