In Depth Review
Site Name:Promotion Box
Site Type:Webmaster / Promotion
Age:1yr 11months
First Impressions and Interest
The team were quite impressed when first landing on the index page.
The forum has an active feel, and looks good.
Like all promotion forums creating interest is very difficult, as most members are there for one reason.
Appearance
Starting at the top literally, the browser tab stands out well with a good favivcon, and it is obvious that Xeforo's SEO is working well as you have canonical URL's.
Moving on to the actual theme, we felt that it has too much of a Xenforo default look to it, and that not a great deal has been done to give it a unique look.
The banner is good with an advertisement placed right in the hotspot, we did feel though that despite having a great logo it could be a little bigger, and made to stand out more.
Xenforo has some very useful add-ons, a lot are unique, we think that better use could be made of the side bar, there is too much white space there that could be used for adverts, affiliates or even self promotion, definitely an opportunity missed. The notices can also be used better, they can be formatted to provide you with sliding ads, literally as many as you like.
You have a great area in the footer, which is slightly spoiled by the uneven size of the text boxes, and can we say misuse of them, again they are great advertising spots.
As we said the Xenforo sidebar is a great widget, but again we think you are not using it to it's full potential, are status updates really needed on a promotion forum ?.
Statistics and Activity
The stats and activity on the site look good, more than a thousand posts per month is very good, we did feel though that the post per member count for a forum nearly two years old could be better.
The admin is by far the greater contributor to the post count, you need incentives to get your staff to post more often and better posts, their contribution is to say the least poor compared to the admin.
The forum needs a way to increase member activity and posting, it needs unique content and more participation from staff.
Activity has been slowing for sometime, in order to boost this we would suggest creating a special group eg: "Valued Contributors" or similar. This could we feel encourage members to become more active and post more.
Content
The content is pretty standard for a promotion /webmaster type forum, again it is hard to find anything unique about Promotion Box.
Most replies tend to be short, one liners almost in a large number of sections, which could indicate that a great deal of people are using you for backlinks, and not really contributing much to the site, which is a pitfall with promotion forums.
You need more unique content, contributions from admin and staff will generate a lot more debate than the subjects members choose to post about.
Organization and SEO
Xenforo has excellent SEO built in, which means that the results for your SEO are a little disappointing, a Google PR of 1 for a site this age is not good, the fact you are missing from two of the top three directories could have a lot to do with this, you need to list with DMOZ and Yahoo, as well as Google, these are the three most other directories of any value work from to crawl sites.
As you have omitted submission to these directories,there is a suspicion that you are not indexed with Google either, something which would greatly improve your presence on the internet.
Using SEO to its full could make this forum really big if run properly.
We also discovered that you are not using a formal sitemap, to make things easy for crawl bots it is best to have sitemap set up as an .xml file in your root folder, this will make you more bot friendly.
From the Reviewers
We all felt that the site has the potential to grow and become successful, however in order to do this a lot more attention has to be paid to the details which turn a good site into a great one.
Better use should be made of the white space, and features that Xenforo software either comes with or is available as free add-ons.
The internet presence of the site is poor, so that needs attention too, a PR 1 is hardly going to attract members with a greater PR, a lot of hard work need to be on SEO and optimisation. Self promotion is the key here.
Appearance wise the forum is good, although it does need the introduction of a unique feel.
The forum descriptions need to be re-read and tweaked, there are spelling and the odd grammar mistake in at least one.
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The general feeling of the team is that the forum has stalled and needs a big bump start to get going again, then consistent TLC to maintain that impetus.
We've awarded you three stars, despite the forum looking good we feel that the lack of attention to detail, and the lack of SEO is not good for a forum which is promoting others.
Star Rating
3.
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