Feedback please for a finance/budgeting forum

[financehubs]

This forum is just up and running for a few days, mainly rely on a lot of friends' support right now, but the owners are all finance guys, so we kept the customization of it to the min, our goal is to add tons of content gradually, hoping that's what we attract members.

Any positive or negative feedback are welcome.

www.FinanceHubs.com (http://www.financehubs.com)

Welcome to register as a member, ask a question and learn too!

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No feedback means you like what you see? Thanks!

[BirdOPrey5]

My guess is no comments because it's a basic out-of-the-box design, no real customizations... So yeah it looks decent enough and works- if you're going to count on your content you'll be fine.

Although, personally, I really dislike the "teal-blue" color you use for your navbar I don't think it goes with the rest of the site at all.

Also you should look into making a custom favicon.ico file (google it if you need instructions.)

I guess I was expecting something different when I saw they were "finance" people- I didn't think talking about Best Buy's buyback program, the lottery, or spam would be topics of interest.

[financehubs]

Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it.

Will play around with the color you mentioned, as well as look into the custom favicon.ico file.

Finance is probably a misnomer, the couple of topics you mentioned probably better called "money trap" issues, but we still viewed them covered under the Finance umbrella.

Content is king for us, we will do our best on that, considering launch some promotions as well to give members incentive to contribute more.

[Jack12]

As far as the design goes, there's not a whole lot to talk about. Fairly standard vbulletin installation, with a few colour tweaks.

In my personal opinion, I believe you would have been better off leaving the default blue there instead of choosing the different blue that you have. It's not making the site any more unique then the last one, and the colour just doesn't seem to blend in with the rest of the page, so it's more of an eyesore than anything else.

There's nothing wrong with using the standard vbulletin theme. It's a perfectly adequate design for people who are looking to attract members purely on content. It's also a better idea to keep it if you aren't quite the best at designing or colour blending a webpage. The default theme is still better than a half effort at a custom theme, which is how this one is coming off. (not saying it is the case, as you've already stated that you're relying on content to pull members, but that is just how it may come off to some visitors).

Other than that, the forum looks fairly well structured, although I would put the offtopic or fun area at the very end, and bring the resources section up before it. I'd also put up a custom favicon.ico image. It really does alot for visitors who'll be able to indentify your site alot quicker.

Hope you take all my comments in the good light that they're intended as, and good luck with the website.

[financehubs]

Truly appreciate all the feedback!

Having played around with the colors and still settled down the "lighter" colors, the vb default color seems to "dull".

favicon is a great suggestion, but after creating one and uploading to public_html directory, it still not working, asking that in the general question forum now.

[FunnyMan]

i could see the fevicon enabled for your site...i am using chrome browser and it works perfectly. clear the browser cache and also remove if you have favorites or bookmarks for your website.

small suggestion, in the left section bar title says "Finance hub", do you need to really say hub at the end of every section name like "max income hub" etc?

article preview images seems to be big, wouldn't it be nice if you could reduce the image size? so that the description text length would match with the image and reduce the white space. just some suggestions.

good luck!

[financehubs]

thanks FunnyMan.

like your advice about removing hubs in the section titles, that's done.

do you know how to reduce the white space of previewed articles? is there any ways to

a) reduce the white space between the article's previewed texts and "Read More ..."

b) auto fix image size to the smaller previewed article space

thanks!

[FunnyMan]

section navigation looks good :)

1) reduce the preview image size using style var -> "Image Thumbnail Max" to lower size
2) edit the template "vbcms_content_article_preview" and merge or alter the "div"'s to bring the "Read More"... immediately after the preview text. This will reduce the white space considerably.

good luck!

[financehubs]

Appreciate your advice, FunnyMan!

[Blue-Inc]

You've definitely made the front page nice and busy which I guess is a good thing for a forum ... with a lot of content and what not!