Small Forum Review
First Impressions
When I first opened up your forum, I say a nice big transparent logo, which looks great. The theme is dark, which is great for a gaming theme. The green and black work well together. However a lot of people do prefer lighter themes. Perhaps you could give members the option to switch between a light and dark theme? That way everyone should be happy.
Scrolling down, I see a rather long layout, which I’ll help you reduce later in the review. Long layouts are confusing and always put me off. You should stick to a maximum of 15 sections, you have 17, which is not far off but for a forum with your stats you should really have about 10-12. Many of the sections don’t even have one single post, and that needs to be changed. If you can’t think of anything to go in that section, you should get rid of it. The activity in general does not look good, if I didn’t know you were closed most of the time you’ve existed there is no way I would join. You have 113 posts and 39 members at this moment, you’ve been open for a week, in that time you should have got more than 113 posts. Overall my first impression was okay, the activity that put me off a bit, your appearance is good.
Appearance
Well, as I have already mentioned, you have a dark theme, black with a bit of green, and those two colours always work well together in my opinion. The logo works well with the theme, the colours match, whoever made it did a good job, no complaints here. Scrolling down to the bottom, I notice your affiliates. Well, I assume that’s your affiliates? I don’t see the word affilates anywhere, there’s just a random image at the bottom. You should say it’s affiliates so that people know why that’s there. The one affiliate you do have is Mario Forums, which is at the very left of the screen. Why is it not lined up with the rest of the site? That would look much better if it wasn’t sticking out at the side. Getting more affiliates would also be a good idea, get your site some more exposure and possibly gain members. Your board markers are relevant to the forums niche which is good to see. Other than the affiliates I don’t see much improvement needed with the appearance.
Ratios and Statistics
Now this is the area that needs improvement. Starting with your layout, as I said above, you have 17 boards and a few subboards. Many have no new posts in months. In the Other Halo Discussion category you have four boards with no new posts since November. To fix this, and make the place look a bit more active, you could combine them into one. If you want you could add subboards for each but even that is not necessary with your current stats. You could then move the other halo discussion board up to the Halo series discussion category. And look at that, three boards lower already!
🙂 I would do the same again for ‘THE ONLINE COMMUNITY SECTION’, merge the boards together and move to the halo series discussion category. This reduces your layout to 12, which is a good amount.
Now, moving on to your stats. You’ve been open for a week, not including however long you were open for the first time around. 113 posts and 39 members is your current post count. That works out to 18 posts per day, again, not including however many were made in November. This is something you need to work on. You have 56 posts, almost half, which shows you are dedicated which is good to see. Your other admin has 23, a decent amount of your size, however I notice he hasn’t been on since November. He needs to get active again or you may as well fire him, what’s the point in having an inactive admin? This leads me to believe that very few posts have been made since reopening which needs to change.
Content
Your announcements are fairly well written with good grammar and spelling. I did notice a few minor errors but nothing major. I see you’ve made two announcements since reopening, you are having a halo tournament which is good to see.
Moving on to the rules, where are they? I don’t see them on the menu or in the announcements. How I am supposed to know what is right and wrong on your forum? Rules are important to stop trouble from happening. You should work on writing up some good rules as soon as possible. Sorry if I missed them, but if that is the case, you should make them either an announcement or on the menu.
Your board descriptions are excellent, no improvements needed here. They are nice and detailed, and not boring as most of the descriptions I review. Many of them include a question as well which is great to see. Other than the rules, you have done well in the content side of things.
Final Remarks
You have a good dark theme, activity and layout is what you need to work on next. With the changes above I’m sure you have the potential to succeed, with a bit of advertising of course.
🙂
After reading your review, please click here to rate your review.
