IM Talks
Quick Review by Red Herring
Analysis:
So today my review is being catered to a website bearing the name of "IM Talks." To be honest, the first thing that came to mind with the "IM" abbreviation was "Instant Messaging", especially considering it is accompanied by the word "Talks" in its title. I had not guessed it was actually referring to "Internet Marketing" until I arrived on the website proper. Fair enough, I suppose, but this name is a bit of a misnomer and has affected my impressions negatively straight off the bat.
I am sad to say my very first negative impressions were not redeemed by any of IM Talks' other elements. To be frank, the more time I spent on this website, the more my opinion of it became increasingly muddled and uncertain. I could only find one rectifiable element that I could say anything good about, as outlined further in this review. Instead, I ended up having to note three negative qualities in order to fully complete this quick review. It's The Good, The Bad, The Bad and the Ugly. Yes, in that order.
Well, I digress. Let's start on a positive note and tackle "The Good" first, shall we?
Strengths:
- Decent Activity
Yes, let's start off on a positive note indeed. Very positive, especially considering this aspect is indubitably the most important aspect of a community: activity. Without any doubt, this is one of the most important elements to be praised in. Without activity, without a community, a forum serves no point. Obviously. Having no community would defeat the entire purpose of having a forum.
So, let's take a look at these statistics. Technically speaking, "IM Talks" was launched back in August of 2013. However, due to a hosting issue, the website was forced to relaunch itself on September 13th, 2013. Most unfortunate, but there's a silver lining. Since the relaunch of "IM Talks", it has garnered a total of 1,066 posts, 392 threads and 43 members. On average, roughly 31 posts and 11 threads are being made per day.
These are very admirable statistics for such a new board. Now, granted, it is by no means an "explosion" of activity, but these are at least above average in regards to statistics for freshly-created boards. I actually find myself somewhat impressed considering the sheer number of flaws "IM Talks" suffers from (no offense). Things are going quite smoothly. Posts are being made across every available board. Commendable effort has been made to get this community rolling, very good work. Continue working hard and ensure it stays that way.
Weaknesses:
- Unoptimized Layout and Navigation
Sadly we must move on to the more...undesirable qualities of "IM Talks." I mean absolutely no offense, but I feel I must be very blunt in order to get my points across. Forgive me in advance if I come off as impolite or even rude, but several things must be criticized here; starting with the board layout of "IM Talks." My gloves are off and I'm about to get critical.
To get straight to the point: board layout = atrocious. I would not go so far as to say that the forums are unnavigable, but they are incredibly untidy. Furthermore, absolutely no effort has been put into forum descriptions; just about all of them follow the formula of "(TITLE OF FORUM) discussions go here." They completely and utterly fail to fulfill their purpose of describing exactly what the forum is for, drastically decreasing user-friendliness and they may end up ultimately confusing users who unfamiliar with their terms. Combined with such a cluttered layout, this is a truly crippling flaw.
The most blatant offender is definitely the "Internet Marketing" section. Not good, considering this is the primary topic of discussion for "IM Talks." Not only is the layout of this category very unoptimized, but the sheer size of it unbalances the entire index and decreases the quality of aesthetics. Could these sections not be compressed into more generalized forums in order to decrease the size? If not, they could instead be separated into two categories in order to organize things a bit better. "Adsense and PPC", "SEO and Link Building", "Social Media Marketing" and "Affiliate Programs" all deal with networking whereas the rest of the forums in Internet Marketing deal with more general topics, they could easily be split to help balance the board. Even after that, however, both categories could do with some serious optimization tweaking and more generalized boards (broader discussion). Most of them deal with incredibly specific topics, making discussion rather limited. If you still want to keep some of them, you could always add them as sub-forums.
The rest of the index fares little better. NINE sub-forums in an off-topic section? Surely they could branched out a little more (Such as an "Entertainment" section to categorize "TV Shows and Movies". "Gaming Hangout" and "Music")? It is not going to hurt for an off-topic section to have more than three forums. In regards to another category, "Miscellaneous" categories are often terrible and serve only to further clutter a forum, and this one is no exception. Every forum within that section could easily be divvied into more specific branches of marketing (Especially if you end up splitting the primary "Internet Marketing" category).
On one final bit of criticism, limited sub-forum display always strikes a poor chord with me. "Books and Literature, Computer and Technology, and 6 more." I recommend that the sub-forum index display be increased to a much higher number and simply display all available sub-forums. It's simply much more convenient to navigate.
Overall, horrendously unoptimized index. It's not at the point where it's impractical to navigate, but it's still incredibly cluttered and could possibly even confuse potential users. It is certainly not user-friendly, and I recommend this be fixed ASAP.
- Artificial Community & Environment
While I was in the midst of exploring "IM Talks" in order to gauge my impressions of it and put them into review form, I noticed something in addition to the cluttered and user-unfriendly layout. While navigating the forums, I began to feel increasingly...alone. Alone and chilly. Strange, isn't it? To be a bit more clear, the entire community itself felt very artificial...cold, even. It was not exactly unfriendly, but it was emotionless. Robotic. Even lifeless, in a way. The general personality of the community felt friendly on the outside; but cold, dead and empty on the inside. It's not often that I critique a website on its community, but I feel this truly was worth mentioning.
Not a single individual registered to "IM Talks" seemed as though they were personally invested into the website. In fact, it felt as though nearly every single member there were simply paid to post (And some probably were, albeit not necessarily with real money). Most of the posts felt completely artificial in personality, many even lacking in any personality to speak of. "IM Talks" has the members and the activity, but it doesn't feel as though it actually has a community. To emphasize my impression, I felt as though I was in the midst of numerous robots with few actual Humans in sight.
There were several aspects that continued to accentuate the artificial feeling of the forum. For starters, almost no one had an avatar. Not even the staff members. It made the environment colorless and bland, highlighting the feelings of the forum being factitious. Secondly, the owner of the forum doesn't have a proper username; it's simply "admin." Believe me when I say that no one within a community wants their leader to be completely nameless. The owner is what holds everything together and bands the community under a banner. For that individual to be completely obscured creates a very disconcerting atmosphere.
These rather chilling community elements made for a very massive turn-off for me. This was not a community, this was an engineered environment built to appear similar to a community. There was never a point in time where I felt at home (or remotely close to it) in "IM Talks." The closest thing I got to a "feeling" of any emotion or personality was a chill in my spine.
- Truly Abysmal Design
We now arrive at the final section of this review: design. In a review I've nicknamed "The Good, The Bad, The Bad and The Ugly", this is "The Ugly". And boy oh boy, I am afraid it is quite ugly. To put some perspective into how negatively I view the design aspects; I would have immediately left and abandoned "IM Talks" on my first visit due to these aesthetics alone, and I am an individual that prefers to give multiple chances and explore potential merits. Were this a full review, the "First Impressions & Appearance" section would receive a 3/20 rating from me. Eek.
The default design of "IM Talks" is horrendous. The only unique design element is in regards to the logo, a logo that is admittedly somewhat pleasant (if lacking in uniqueness) to the eyes, but a logo that's also completely out of place in this design, serving only to emphasize the negative. The design itself appears to be one adapted from the MyBB default theme considering it uses all of the default MyBB icons and buttons and is generally similar in appearance. Truth be told, the design would have been much better off if it remained default and unedited. The colors all blend terribly and consist of a palette of white, light grey, dark grey and blue. Navigation elements in the header are white on light grey, making them incredibly difficult to read. The forums themselves make use of the darker shade of grey, to ghastly effect. This also applies to thread listing and threads/posts themselves. Grey. I want to reiterate here. Grey is a terrible choice for forum listing/threads/backgrounds (especially dark grey) due to it being a very dull and monotone color; a dullness which seeps into your forums and makes everything very boring to look at.
Well, I had grown very tired of this theme very quickly, so I went to the User Control Panel in order to check if "IM Talks" has multiple themes to choose from. Much to my surprise and my relief, there were two additional designs to choose from...and I eagerly switched to one, happy to get away from the default design. Sadly, my relief was shattered immediately. Both of these themes were even worse than their default predecessor.
"The Cure" made use of irritatingly bright colors that actually hurt my eyes and used some of the most mismatched and poorly blended colors I've ever seen: scarlet, very bright red, blue, turquoise, midnight blue and sky blue. It contained terribly blended navigation elements, an out-of-place logo, a terrible cropped avatar display, MyBB default icons and poorly implemented CSS for the forums. In the footer, I read "Theme designed by Audentio Design." Well, whatever it was originally has been completely butchered, which is a shame. Audentio Design created some of the best MyBB themes available.
The "SkyBird" theme design fared only a little better than its "The Cure" counterpart. Once again, I was accosted by poorly blended colors, this time in the form of a hideous olive green for primary color and greyish blues for board index design; colors which contrast very poorly, but not so much as "The Cure." The logo was different this time around, but was just a square cutout unable to blend with the header and complete with cheesy GIMP effects. And, of course, this one also made use of MyBB default icons/buttons, all of which do not mesh well with darker themes like this one. Admittedly, the actual forum board design is not bad, but it's so out of place in the design that it just serves to further degrade theme quality.
I ended up switching back to the default design, because that one was at least tolerable, albeit barely. I absolutely could not stand the other two.
Listen, there is nothing wrong with an unedited MyBB theme simply downloaded from a MyBB theme website or even MyBB's official website. Many of them are very pleasant and are all you really need to make your users content with aesthetics. These edits and adaptions are not working out. I could not find one redeemable quality about any of the current themes. This is by far the most crippling flaw of the forum, as the vast majority of visitors put quite a bit of stock into aesthetics for their first impressions. Believe me when I say that the current designs are going to drive a lot of those visitors away. I advise this be alleviated immediately.
Final Remarks:
I am very sad to report that my visit to "IM Talks" was a most dubious experience. My first impressions were negative right off the bat from the moment I visited, and they only continued to go downhill from there. Were this a full review, I am almost certain that "IM Talks" would likely receive a 20/100 - 30/100 score from me. The number of positive elements can be counted on one hand
(and not a full hand at that) whereas the negative aspects are almost numerous.
From an unoptimized and poorly categorized board index, to an artificial community, and finally, near-abhorrent theme design, I was left with only bad impressions of "IM Talks." At the moment, there is almost no force on earth that would make me become part of the community willingly without some form of benefit attached to it.
I'd advise you get to work immediately, "IM Talks", you have a great many flaws to mend and repair. Nevertheless, whatever path you walk, whatever road you travel, I wish you the best of luck, "IM Talks." I hope you garner all the success you could possibly desire. My best regards.
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