Small Forum Review
First Impressions
This is a very congested niche so to be successful a forum in this genre needs to stand out in some way, I was pleased to see that you had stayed away from the “blue” that most admin seem to be using now, it’s also pleasing to see another admin with a sense of “adventure” a bit like Joel with Advertise Hotspot. It’s very bright, very vibrant, and it will make you stand out.
This theme tends to draw you in and make you want to do more. I like it.
Appearance
The appearance is typical Xenforo, and I see you have chosen a fixed width, which as I have found with my theme, it does not give you a lot of space on the index page, but once you move inside it reverts to full width, unlike some other styles so it is easy to read and follow posts.
I am a little confused by your index page category icons, and your forum icons, to me they do not seem to fit in with the genre, some more suitable ones would be ideal.
One thing I would suggest is that you try to make your banner a little more inspiring, it lacks size and depth, and for a promotion forum offering graphic services, it doesn’t look that “special”.
Even though you are new, you should have a favicon, it’s very easy to install, and in an instant it makes the site look more professional.
Navigation is good, people do need to get used to Xenforo as it is not as popular yet, as other software, you have good tabs, good category separation, and good forum distribution.
One trap a lot of new sites fall into is too many forums, you have avoided this quite well, your choice of titles is good, and expansive enough to cover most things, you will need to build on this as you get busier.
Ratios and Statistics
At the moment I would say your staffing levels are fine, membership is quite small so you should be able to cope with any disputes that do crop up.
You do need to recruit some specialist staff, I cannot see how you will be able to perform all the tasks once membership grows, once that is done the preparatory work is basically done. Once people can see specialist staff, they will be more likely to request services, if you already have the staff in you membership, consider giving them a rank, this will tell people what they do.
Content
As you would expect from a new forum there is not a fantastic amount of content to review, what you have done is to spread what content you do have well across the board, personally I would like to have seen double the amount of posts before you launched, this is of course very difficult with a promotion forum because you need requests to provide content, one way would have been to get e-friends, admins etc to test your services, to not only add some "real" content, but also give you some idea of time scales for completion.
Getting that content is going to be difficult, I've given you a suggestion, now you need to think up more promotion gimmicks to get people interested.
Final Remarks
This is a very young forum in a very congested genre, you will need to work very hard if the forum is to become popular, this is why you need to recruit specialist staff, your job now is to promote, and like you have never done before, you have to be known as a trusted and informative site, so you need to work hard on page rank, getting your name out there is paramount, visiting forums of all genres, offering free services to get you going is one way, using directories is another.
This will not be a quick process, you have to build a reputation, and build a base of webmasters who will keep coming back, much of it is catch 22, a lot of admins will not use you at first because of your low PR, so it is very important to build that first.
Steady, continued growth should be your aim, set yourself daily or weekly targets for the number of places to advertise, keep a check on which sites are working for you, and put more effort into those.
I for one would like to see you succeed.
Finally
Xenforo has a built in “Notices” add on, which can be used to draw people in, use it to advertise your opening “free” offers, you can also use it for specific members, so that when their request is complete you can tell them personally, it’s a great feature, and is very under used.
Also search the resources on Xenforo to find other add on’s that could help you site, try googling xenforo add ons, a lot you may have to pay for, but there are free ones out there as well.
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If this were a scoring review, IMO it would be over 70/100
