yacht-talk.com
 

I've had the website up now for 3 months with minimal traffic and no unique user posts. (Have tried creating topics of interest). Please offer any criticism....I'm entirely open and extremely new to forum website maintenance. Thank you!

http://www.yacht-talk.com

Holy crap, that's one huge header. It needs to be shrunk, majorly.

I changed the header, and will change the color later. Thanks for the reply. Do I need more content to get people in? What do you all think of the layout as is?

The cms page could use some work with the linking structure / display.

You don't use categories? Why is that? Looks good ;)

dumb question...what's the difference between a category and section on the cms page? Seem to accomplish the same thing to me...

ok well , it hurt my eyes.. thats a really bad sign.. i dont like it , VERY bright , super simple and very ugly... truthfully , i dont mean to put you down , but thats "My" honest opinion ..... this new vB4 fever release is making vBulletin sites ugle...

Very bright had to click it of quite fast lol was dark in my room :eek:
And yet again its vb4 all the same just diff colours no real custom tweeks to it

I appreciate the honest feedback, and that kind of stuff is EXACTLY what I want to hear! I'm learning what everything does in the stylevar...too many options at times! Will look for custom stuff here soon...I'm open to any and all suggestions!

changed the colors to a much less vibrant scheme...looks boring though!

Ok. Just a few small ideas (I'm no design expert myself).

Less white if you can. Viewing the home page and the forums index, its just that bit too bright really. If someone is a bit tired, maybe browsing the net after their days work - its simply going to hurt their eyes and they'll navigate away. I know its a pain in the ass, and theres over 100 different things you can tweak in the stylevars, but you need to do something. If you don't have the time to do it yourself, maybe consider installing one of the free themes on here for a while to take the pressure off yourself.

Next observation - content is definitely king. You need to get people posting somehow. As its a yacht based forum I'm guessing you probably have one yourself? Get some of your yachting buddies to sign up and post some threads. Promise them a beer or something for their effort.

Front page - try to make use of some of the widgets that are available to you. At the moment you have the calender and .... well, nothing else activated. If a spider does come across your site then there isn't a whole lot for it to index which means you'll never rank very high in the search engines. Maybe change the article layout a little too to make it even appear more populated - like having them displayed in the 1x2 pattern instead of just a single column.

Thank you Rob, I appreciate your input. All things I haven't thought of, being "in the forest" so to speak. Thanks for the advice!

I meant

Category Name
===>Forum
======>Sub Forum
===>Forum
======>Sub Forum


You get it?

No problem at all Chris

Good luck with it - and giz a shout if you're finding yourself in over your head :)

made changes that warrant a new look....still not "las vegas style" in the glitz and glamour...more like "topeka kansas on a friday night". making progress though.

Shyts cool.. but theirs not much to talk about on yats