Large Forum Review
First Impressions
When I first visit your forum I don’t get a great feeling from it. I get a cold, lonely feel which doesn’t really make me want to stay. It is hard for me to put my finger on exactly what causes this feeling but I think it may be a combination of the theme and the large top area before the board begins. The logo stands out to me in an odd way due to it being the only colour on the page which makes it a bit overpowering and it isn’t positioned very well in the header area. Overall your theme gives me a really uneasy feeling which I don’t like at all.
(Score: 7/15)
Appearance
As I have already said your theme doesn’t really appeal to me. There are too many different colours being used for a start. I can accept that you have gone for a black and blue concept with white text areas but I really can’t understand the choice of orange for the font. I find this really off-putting. There are different ways you can choose to make a theme and different feelings you can aim for. I get the idea that you have tried to make a theme that gives off a calm feeling which the orange font really destroys. The lines that border the sub-boards row under each board make the forum feel really split up and also cause the index to be really long, for this reason I suggest you remove these lines. I also don’t feel the need for a 4px blue border on the category headers, these would look much better in solid black. Overall I feel that this theme needs a lot of work if not replacing all together. It is a very standard Xenforo theme with a few colour changes and I believe you need something more unique to succeed in such a crowded niche.
Your logo doesn’t make any sense to me. It looks like a 5 minute throw together that actually infringes copyright law as it uses a Mozilla style fox. I would suggest you remove that logo before you get a court order in your post box. The text on the banner, Webmaster’s rule means either two things Webmasters is rule or A webmasters rule as in a rule belonging to the webmasters. You need to look into grammar when making logos, things can go very wrong. The actual text has no effects or edits made to it, it’s just blank white. You have got to put effort into the small details if you want people to use your forum.
(Score: 10/20)
Statistics and Activity
Messages: 15,930
Members: 451
Opened: 24th February 2012
At a first glance then the stats for your forum look great for a forum that has only been open two months. However I happen to know that your forum is using the database of an old forum so I am not going to judge your forum on how many posts it has gained per month as I am unable to obtain an accurate figure. Scrolling down your forum I don’t see a huge amount of activity which leads me to believe that you aren’t gaining a huge amount of posts every day. I believe this is due to the crowded niche of webmaster forums and your forum really not being any different from any other webmaster forums. Your forum is small and doesn’t have great activity meaning it is easy for users to choose a different webmaster forum over yours that has better activity. This means that it is really important for you to find a unique approach to the webmaster niche to make users choose your forum.
(Score: 12/20)
Ratios
You have loads of boards, many of them with sub-boards and hardly enough posts to fill some of them. The spread of posts is very uneven and most of them are not in the webmaster topic boards which doesn’t look good considering the fact that this is meant to be a webmaster forum. I feel you need to look at your boards again as many of them cover the same sort of thing and can easily be merged with eachother.
You have 2 admins, 1 moderator and a Package team member. I don’t see any issues with the amount of staff but your packager only has 25 posts which is really poor for a staff member. Your second admin also needs to improve his post count.
(Score: 3/10)
Content
The post content on your forum is of a good quality and the replies to posts are lengthy with correct grammar which is good. This means that the members posting are members you should work hard to keep. The content on your forum on a whole may be of a good quality but many of the topics are about the same thing and usually the replies are pretty similar. This makes the content uninteresting and not very friendly for search engines.
(Score: 16/20)
Navigation
It is easy to navigate your forums and I didn’t have too many problems finding what I was looking for. I would however like to see links to the staff team, ToS and Privacy Policy in the forums footer and a larger font size on the menu.
(Score: 14/15)
Total Score
62/100
Final Remarks
In my opinion this is not a webmaster forum, it is a promotion forum. That is the conclusion I come to after looking at the boards. The forum also looks in many ways like a copy of FP, for example you use the same board topics and the same kind of layout. There are so many things on this forum that I would NOT expect on a webmaster forum. All in all this looks like a rush job that hasn’t been thought through properly.
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