Critique please
 

I really need some constructive criticism. My site is a low traffic site for myself and just a few gamers so I'm not focusing on generating traffic. I just enjoy working on the site.

Your skin is not very nice. But the colours do match for war games etc. At first i couldn't find my way to the forums index, if i was you i would remove the links on your banner and make it more visible on how to enter the forum i was pretty confused. Overall cool site and maybe add some more forums so more people can post in differnt sections.

Thanks for taking the time to visit my site. My first reaction to your critique was to check for valid points... I will agree on one of your critiques, the skin may not be very nice as I came up with it by altering the heck out of a style I "purchased".

I wasn't going to reply to thank you until I visited your site and discovered any critique from someone with a site that looks as your does is really kind of silly and pointless but, I will give you the statement about the style I'm using some merit, it could be better.

Hm, hey now.. your theme isn't my cup of tea either, but I want to touch on something other than that here..

You REALLY need to not have a category for each and every forum that you have. Categorize multiple forums in one, that will make your forum home not so cluttered and messy. My eyes have no where to focus, it's a big blur of Army green with a few gold lines going across..

I'm also not a big fan of the navigation in the header. When you hover over forums, all the other navigation options just disappear. Keep them there, there's no reason to hide them from your visitors at all.

Yeh I guess but, I like that little header menu I did and it beats the heck out of the Vbulletin standard issue "navbar" that just bores the hell outta of me.

Thanks for the input :rolleyes:

You don't need a category for everything.. Just add one or two categories labeled 'General' and add the forums under there.

How do you get to your forum? I had to go via a newspost, not very attractive, sorry. Although keep trying and improvement will follow.

I have links made into the header, top left of page. The menu clearly has Forums marked on it. Is it really not that noticeable?

I noticed it just fine.

Sorry, I must have been really tired. Now I notice it. :)

Hi! :) Just gave your site a visit and I noticed that most of the boards were set to private, probably cause I'm viewing the forums as a guest.

One thing that may help keep the guests coming and registering is keeping some of the forums open to the public. :) Some people may leave right away when they see that they can't access anything.

Okay, where can I start first? Well for one thing, as said, the seperate categories thing looks pretty silly, and while you have a good amount of forums (a tad too few, but a good amount), you should put them into broader categories, maybe like this:

Gaming (fancier name needed):

Battlefield 2
Guild Wars
BF1942 DC

General Chat

General Chat
News Feeds
Introductions

Tech News and Tech Help Desk

[what you have under that]

This also moves general chat down, and the forums for your topic up which means more people will see the interesting discussions rather than the chit chat first, and possibly be more likely to join and post more in the topical forums.

I also think you do not need a forum for arcade improvements; have a topic in general discussion which is stickied and the links/downloads manager thing should instead be a bold link in the navbar or something rather than a forum redirect (it's a key feature, and should be treated as such I'd say).

Next, make less forums private. You need search engines to see the interesting content for it to get more known, and guests like to read what's there before they join. Also, fill in the posts in any empty forums, last post should NEVER say 'never'.

I can't say much about the style, other than it fits the theme I can see in the site, so well done. Yeah, some people here don't like it, but it's topically fitting, and in my opinion appeals to gamers.

You do need to make less of the forum members only though, maybe keep some things like actual downloads and stuff members only to encourage them to join rather than the whole thing? I can't comment on your blog system usage because of this.

Finally, you have a nice array of smilies, so well done on that, and in case I didn't imply this, well done on actually keeping down the number of forums, since a lot of people make hundreds of them when their site is brand new and it overwhelms the visitor.

All points being considered, thanks.

No problem, although I'd say that style itself is fine.