Pre-Launch Review
Site Name: The Admin Shack
Site Type: Webmaster/Admin Forum
Age: 1 Month & 1 Week Old
Appearance
Lets start off with the appearance of your forum. Your forum's background image that you decided to use is very interesting and really bring out the body of the forum. It really pops out to the user and grabs the audience's attention when the open up your site. Your Favicon image that you chose is a simple computer. Try making it a bit more advanced, such as "AS" for Admin Shack or something a bit more creative and unique to the site. Your banner seems to be a bit bland really. It is just text that lights up a bit when you hover like a basic link. Try adding an image or an effect and possibly even some subtext to the banner to make it a bit more friendly. The icons that you used to mark if a forum is new, locked, or not new seem to be a bit small. Try making them a bit bigger and try to get them to pop out a bit with a possible effect or glow effect when they are new or locked. Overall your forum has a pretty good appearance but it just has a few things that could be worked upon to help satisfy the audiences as well as yourself.
Layout
In the home page, you only have 8 forums that members can post topics in and participate in and 2 of those forums are empty. With only 8 forums, you won't get much content in your site because there won't be much of a variety for people to choose from. Try adding some more forums & categories to make the forum look a bit more active and a bit more welcoming. I would also suggest getting content added into those 2 empty forums as soon as possible because it is very helpful to have content in all forums so that the viewers won't think the site is losing popularity and people want to join sites that have lots of good content. Also, the "Popular Tags" box in the legend of the site seems to be a bit distracting as it just seems to be placed there and it isn't necessarily neatly placed to keep the site looking organized. Try finding a new place for that such as up in the header or something along those lines. Overall, your forum's layout seems to be lacking some important things and should probably get worked on a bit more.
First Impressions and Interest
Some of my interests in your site was that it is a webmaster forum and that it seems to be going off with a pretty good head start on getting members and content rolling and not a lot of technical issues seem to be popping up within the site. Some of my first impressions were pretty good and I was excited to see more of your site after taking a quick glance but upon looking deeper into the site I noticed the lack of forums and the lack of content in some forums. Some of those things will really drive people away from your site. Your site has some good interesting things such as the navigation bar and the widgets that you have implemented into your site. Overall, your site has some very good interesting features in it and really got me hooked at first but try to see what you can do about adding more forums and such as I stated before.
Content
Your forum has 281 posts and 48 members, which means that if every member was active and posting, each member would have about 5-6 posts only. You may want to get your members active and try getting them to post more topics and get more posts to help raise the site's popularity on the Search Engines. Try doing a posting competition or something along those lines to pump up your members and get them excited to post more. I would also suggest requesting a package to possibly get some content added into those 2 empty forums. Overall, your site seems to really be lacking some content for your site and with 48 members, you should have well over 281 posts.
Words from the Reviewer
Overall your forum was pretty good but I would just like to highly suggest that you take everything that I said in this review into consideration when working on your site next time and best of luck on making your forum better!
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