Basic Review
Site Name: The Product Forum
Site Type: Marketing
Age: Over a year
Appearance
Starting from the top your banner and favicon actually look great. Simple but quite inviting and matches the forum's niche and idea well. You still have blank space to the right of the banner, though. You can center the banner or make the banner as long as the entire column so there won't be white space around. The top menu looks rather not tidy; the Facebook connect button is out of place with other links at the header. You also have three links to the forum index; simplify them into only one or two if possible. The 'Go' button for search box is too far away, you will need to fix that. Social network buttons and 'Media' link were confusing before you clicked to see what 'Media' actually contains.
The body index is pretty good. I like your idea of having separate forum icons for each category. What I don't like is how you make the forum's width so small that you end up having so much blank space at the left and right side. The forum's body (icons/texts/descriptions) are too close to the edge line. It gives the impression that your forum is too small, too packed, rather uncomfortable. Same goes with the side bar. Why not enlarge the width a bit, give space to both forum body and side bar so it becomes easier for visitors to read around. Inside, the icons used are standard vB icons, not too special there. It is one thing you can work on to make your forum feels more personal.
No problem with the footer. Privacy Policy might best moved to the top menu, but given how packed your header already is, I suppose it is good enough there.
Layout
I have no major problems with your forum's layout. I think they are done ni good size, enough to concentrate discussions but not too small either. I think "The Consumer Market" category and "Market Place and Members Help" category can be merged as one, as they are all related to products buying and selling. One rather big issue I find is that advertisement link as the very first forum of your first category. I understand if it is one of your income sources., but if possible please switch it somewhere else, or a separated category or table or something else. To look it integrated with the forums is rather distracting, members may be annoyed with advertisements, and it makes the forum look not good.
Statistics and Activity
TPF has 11,977 posts with 1,002 members. For a forum in such niche as old as more than a year, that number is perhaps rather low. The ratio is 11 posts per member, which is very low. Half of your members have no posts. Only two members have been active lately to post around. As you said, you are planning to work on the forum again so I won't comment much on this. You will have to try hard to bring back attention to the forum again and clear up the old inactive accounts.
I will also mention about your forum's staff composition. Since the forum was inactive before, I wouldn't say much. Three administrators for around 500 members (not counting the inactive accounts with zero posts) is quite good. Two administrators can still suffice actually if you really have four moderators as shown in site leaders page. I don't understand why you have to moderator group. I suggest to make an integrated one and adjust the number to match the forum's need. With its current state for re-opening, I say two administrators with three moderators would be enough.
Content
Content wise, TPF actually has its base already. Although the threads are mostly old, the discussions quite vary from many sections you provide. It will be even better if you can also provide news and helpful articles for readers and visitors as discussion threads solely will sometimes be boring too for several members. Especially for a forum that has been around for a while, members and visitors tend to want to find something new and different than other forums, and it will be rather hard to reach that solely from discussion threads only. What you have there are mostly 'A vs B, which one is better?' and so on. Try to encourage more open topics for discussions later once you have officially re-opened the site and get members coming in to post to make the forum more inviting. It can also be a good idea to use the blog for, don't you think so?
Grammar wise, I don't think there are grave mistakes in index body or in posts. Your last forum is named as "Web' Discussion" though, need to get rid of that strange apostrophe and you will be fine. The names used for categories/forums sections are rather too common; while they express messages very clear, a bit more uniqueness in naming won't hurt for variation.
Organization and SEO
TPF came as first result of "the product forum" when I searched in Gioogle, but nothing could be find when I went to Yahoo. To be honest I find searching with other keywords difficult because your forum doesn't really have a strong are or unique point which can be used to find you. Words like 'market', 'product', 'marketing', 'financial', and 'discussion' combined together didn't work well. You will need to improve on this. Your forum has rank 2 at Google Page Rank. Alexa Traffic Rank is 377,551 and sites linked is 214. Quite a good number for going one year old, keep on improving for better search engines result by adding unique contents and features.
Words from the Reviewer
The Products Forum has quite the good basics, too bad it had to be inactive for a certain period. Good luck reviving it. One thing you need to do will be to find a way to perk members' interest and improving the result in search engines for example, and that can be achieved by keep on advertising as well as providing unique content. I mentioned some above, hopefully it can help to bring back your forum past this re-start line!
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