Basic Review
Site Name: Shole Company
Site Type: Webmaster
Age: 4 months
Appearance
Theme wise, as someone who have used the theme before for one of my experimental forum, it has both good and bad traits. Although it only uses a combination of black, grey, and white, it has quite a nice layout. However, I don't think it is very special for a webmaster forum like Shole Company. Maybe you are waiting and searching for better themes, I believe you are; if you can get a customized theme it would be great. If not at least you should try to modify the theme more with webmaster-related icons or designs, for example categories/forums icons.
The banner is rather plain for such site. It is also too close to the left edge, you need to add more margin and make the banner centered at least in the white space area for banner. If you can make a more colorful banner, it will be better. One of bad point of the theme is that if you use a banner too colorful it won't look good as it won't fit the theme. It's your choice, but I do think you can still explore more with the banner. The favicon is rather confusing; I don't know what picture you used there. Maybe a symbol or "SC" to resemble your forum's name can work as a favicon.
The images you used for categories/forum icons, topic icons, and smilies are still standard. Smilies are still tolerable, but for the rest if you can customize it for your own forum so it will be moer related to webmaster discussion that would be better. Your rank images are pretty good, but they are too big in my opinion. It looks as if they occupy too much space when seen in post layout; resizing them may resolve this.
The footer is okay. The "Media Embedding" line is a bit out of place, centering it to make it part of the credits above will help to make footer tidier.
Layout
The layout is not bad. I agree with your categories order, you give the right positions to sections there. My concern is only about how your off-topic sections/forums not related to webmaster discussions and website advertising are a lot more. There are 13 sub-forums in the off-topic category. Even previous categories all summed up together are not that many. I'm just worried members and visitors will be more active there than at the on-topic sections. It may still work that way if you don't keep the on-topic sections keep on going with new and interesting content. I just think you need to be more careful with this. Otherwise, it's pretty good.
Statistics and Activity
Shole Company has 6,067 posts and 426 members in four months since opening. That roughly means 380 posts per week and 14 posts per member. While the number of posts per month is quite good, the number of posts per member is rather low. After looking at the member list, I found out why. You have around 300 members with no post at all. Only a few active within the last 48 hours. That is quite serious, as it composes more than half of total members you have. I advise you to delete old inactive accounts and start to advertise more to get active members. You can also try to contact old members and get contests or interesting activities going to pick interest.
Staff members post ratio is small compared to total posts, which is pretty good. However, looking deeper, there is a big post number difference between three staff members you have. The other administrator also in moderator group which is rather strange, and your super moderator looks very inactive given the post number difference. I'm not sure of the exact staff situation, but you will need to reorganize your staff members properly for a more stable administration of the forum.
Content
When I first visited your forum, I saw two pop-up advertisements: one blocked by my Firefox, another one is relatively smaller so it wasn't blocked. I'm not sure if this is a good idea; visitors may be annoyed with the advertisements when they first visited their site and may leave without checking the content. While I understand you need advertisements too, perhaps you need to find another way to display it so you won't have to risk visitors getting annoyed with advertisements.
I was looking at your rule thread and I found several grammatical mistakes there. First of all you shouldn't use apostrophe like in "Rule's". There are also mistakes like using 'eather' instead of 'either'. You use a funny picture in your rule thread. While that makes the tension not as high, rule thread is still an important thread so I'm not sure if it's a good choice to display such picture. Some may take your rules lightly. Separation of a laid-back and serious atmosphere is also important for professionalism. Aside from that, forum descriptions are pretty good.
Looking deeper, since you have more off-topic areas, variety of topics there are generally better than on-topic ones. You will need to re-think about this, I suppose, to give more work and attention to the on-topic areas and add unique content to keep the site to survive. Your 'Footer Link' service is still empty, you can start using it or brainstorm for new kind of service to help members.
Organization and SEO
A search at Google and Yahoo with your forum's name gave perfect result that Shole Company was at the first position. More common keywords, especially related to webmaster and administration discussion, did not give satisfying results, though. This may have something to do with the need of more unique content. Google Page Rank is 1. Alexa Traffic Rank is 1,718,621 with sites linked in 36 other websites. Keep on working with the backlinks and add more unique content to your forum to keep things going in with the search engines.
Words from the Reviewer
There are already a lot of webmaster and administration websites out there, either forums or blogs I'm sure you are aware of that. Therefore you will need to work hard on content, especially on-topic ones. Think of unique things you can do with the niche and your forum to keep members and visitors interested. Good luck with that.
Star Rating
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