Small Forum Review
First Impressions
When I first opened up your forum, my first impression was pretty good. You have a dark theme that fits the niche of your forum and is easy on the eyes. I see a message explaining I need to log in to post and access certain features, but unlike a lot of places I don’t see too many demanding messages telling me to join, which is great. I really like your logo as well, it matches the colour of the theme, it looks really good.
The next thing I notice is a really long layout, with 26 boards and so many subboards I’m not going to count them. This just meakes everything look more confusing and messy. With fewer boards your activity will also look better. I’ll help you with the layout later in the review. You’ve been open almost 6 weeks now with only 400 posts which doesn’t look good either, that would be something that would put me off joining, I’ll get into that more a bit further into the review as well.
Appearance
As I said above your theme looks good, I like to see dark themes and they always work well on gaming forums. Your logo is transparent and matches the colours of the theme. You logo really looks amazing, I am impressed. Your logo is at the very left of the screen, and it leaves a big space with nothing in it. I think it would look better in the middle, so that there is no open space with nothing in it. Scrolling down to the bottom, I notice you have a GFX designers group. Is this necessary? You own a gaming site, not a gfx and I don’t think this is necessary for your niche, and more staff groups just looks more confusing and more intimidating. Your favicon is looking good, it is your forums initial’s, so people can easily tell it’s your site. This is something many sites I review don’t have, so good job getting that done. Your board markers are speech marks, which I assume is the default, which I find a bit boring. I feel it would look much better and more interesting if you changed it to something niche specific, so for you something gaming related would look good.
Ratios and Statistics
As I said at the beginning of the review, you have 26 boards, which is way too many for a forum of your size. The maximum you should have is 15, at the very most. What I would do here is cut down to 2 or 3 boards per category, any more is unnecessary. For example, for the Microsoft category, you really only need the Microsoft Games and Microsoft Consoles boards. All the rest can be merged into one of those. And I would get rid of most of those sub boards as well, the majority don’t even have a single post. Just do this with all your categories and you will cut down your layout significantly.
Moving on to your statistics, your forum does not appear to be doing too well in this area. You have 400 posts in almost 6 weeks you’ve been open. This averages to about 9 posts per day, which needs to be improved. You should try doing some exchanges and asking your friends to join and help out with the activity. According to your Leaders page, you are the only staff member. I would try and find some staff to help you out, it can be hard to manage on your own. You have 48 posts, about 15% of your total, which could be better but isn’t too bad. The more you post the more dedicated it shows you are, and dedicated admins are always a good thing.
Content
Looking over your announcements, they are very well written with detail. Good grammar and spelling is used and they look professional which is great. Your other posts and topics around the forum are of decent length and quality as well. No concerns in this area.
Your rules, on the other hand, I’m not so impressed with. It looks to me these are the default rules or have been taken from the terms of service. They really don’t tell you what you can and can not do at all. All they really say is you are responsible for your posts and your posts can be removed for any reason. You need to write up some good rules so that people know what they can and can not get away with.
And finally, your board descriptions. These need some work. Some of them are only a single word long, and there are a couple boards with no description at all. The majority are one sentence long with no period at the end of sentences. All descriptions should be about 2-3 sentences in length and should tell members what goes where, and should have good grammar with a period at the end.
Final Remarks
Your theme and logo are great, you need to work on your layout and activity. Just keep going and make these changes and you have the potential to succeed.
🙂
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