Skilldrill
Review by Atrox
First Impressions
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When I first went on Skilldrill I was hit by a nice blue theme. Without scrolling down because these are my very first impressions - I saw three news banners floating in the middle of the white block which didn't look the nicest at all. If I were you, I'd look for a news modification or create your very own news modification that does not require a complete new color block for every piece of news that you want to put out there. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck with three ugly blue lines that are completely detached from the rest of the theme that look so misplaced.
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Average
Design Quality
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You're using a very nice logo and theme in my opinion, the logo fits in very well although it's rather basic and the theme is well used but is still a very pretty theme to me. The only bad thing that I could say about the theme is how ugly the sidebar looks. Any theme that has a sidebar that isn't in my good books unless it fits in really well. It may look pretty when you move it but really, the modification to the sidebar is unneeded and not the wisest of choices.
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Average
Site Statistics
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Skilldrill doesn't have the best activity rates from what I can see, it's at 2,340 posts right now and is not seeing many regular posts. You have many forums that have not been posted in for a while, this can be one of the reasons that you're not getting any new signups because visitors don't want to join a forum that isn't very active. If you look at today's posts, there have only been 10 today. The site statistics/activity is very poor and is one of the things that you need to try and focus on if you want new members.
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Poor
Staff Professionalism
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From what I have seen, majority of your staff team are professional and well mannered and whilst being playful most if not all of the staff there have been maintaining high post quality with only minor grammatical errors at the best of times. Your News Announcements have been well written with once again, very minor grammatical errors that could easily be fixed. To ensure that you don't continue to make these errors, maybe you should run your announcements through an online grammar and spellchecker to maintain professionalism.
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Good
Originality
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For the originality, I can't give you many points. From me categories and forums you have I can only assume that you are a general discussion forum with a new name to try and get people to join. A general discussion forum is probably one of the forums that have been done the most. What's even worse is that you didn't even come up with some semi-original category/forum names which makes the forum look like a very obvious copy-cat of many general discussion forums out there. To make the forum even remotely original maybe you should try and think up some creative names?
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Very Poor
Site Structure
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Since your forum is basically a general discussion forum with a new name, any structure will work. Although you need to have "The Community" based things as the very first category because of their importance and you need to ensure that members are reading what they should be. You've done exactly that. After "The Community" you can put the categories and forums into whatever order you like because of the forum's niche. However, I won't be rating it terribly high due to the fact that you have not used even semi-original names.
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Average
Grammar & Spelling
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I talk about this from the index page, where you can see all of the categories and forums. Straight from the start I could see errors, on that announcement bar just underneath the logo it said "Lets help each other out.". I have seen you repeat this throughout your forum descriptions, you need to remember that an apostrophe is needed. In the "Introduce Yourself" forum description, "Lets us know something" was wrote in there. That needs to be changed to "Let us know something". I could go on for a while, but I won't. I have seen that mistakes have been made and now you know, you can go and fix them to make your site look more professional.
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Average
Final Remarks
As I have said, you need to encourage activity and post more frequently yourself before members will even post. People don't want to join a forum where the staff team are hardly posting themselves. You also need to come up with some (at least) semi-original category and forum names along with correcting the descriptions and the news line underneath the logo. It can be hard to get a general discussion forum up and running simply because there are so many out there that are better than yours from the start. With dedication and some changes made, I'm sure you can get somewhere with Skilldrill.
Your Score
