New Site, New Adventure, Tell us what you think
 

I have started a new website www.askmy2cents.com using vbulletin 3.8 where anyone can come and talk about anything. So far we have received a lot of positive feedback and would like to continue to get peoples opinion on the site.*** Advertising removed ***
Thanks for all the help and criticism

Nick

fast running site..

I appreciate the time it takes to setup but you have far to many subforums for the little traffic you currently have. I know you hope to 'grow into it' but I think that would happen faster if many of your topics were combined... you should probably only have 3 or 4 forums... split them later after traffic increases.

^ thanks for the input, much appreciated!

Really? As i hit quote on your message and type right now. The page hasn't even loaded fully yet. All im getting is the header, its not that fast whilist other websites are faster than that :p (Still hasn't loaded fully)

Finally loaded like 3 seconds after i posted this message lol, i was typing slowly. )

Upon revisiting the site it did take an exceptionally long time to load, all I got was the header... during this time the browser said it was waiting on www.google.com. Usually scripts such as google analytics would go at the bottom of the footer so they are last to load... I don't know off-hand why your board is contacting google but I would suggest moving any code to the footer if possible.

I guess i never noticed how long it took. I recently added a Meta tag to the header which was part of adding my site to google. Could that be why it is taking so long?

If your Meta tags are just a few words, maybe a paragraph for a description, then no, it's very unlikely meta tags would affect performance, they are just plain text.

its only about a sentence, so Im guessing thats not the culprit. Are there any tips to help drive traffic to the site. I have heard about being able to buy traffic, but I dont see that as being legit. Any suggestions?

I personally would never 'buy' traffic... I would suggest doing some search engine optimization and then provide content that people search for... I always get some traffic from mentions of popular tv shows "how is 24 going to end?" was a big one lately... also decent traffic to common computer issues if you know anything or anyone who can answer questions... of course it doesn't hurt to post the site in any places like this that welcome links to new sites- there are probably a dozen forums for admins out there all which have a thread to list a site.

Strange, I had no issue at all accessing the forums.

As mentioned before, you have way too many subforums, even if they are populated. You would have to look at removing several of them and combining them. Example would be:

Introductions category - Rename this to Announcements
In this category, put a site announcements forum, a questions/feedback forum and your introductions forum.

Get Help - Remove this category, and merge the two subforums of this category into one "Questions and Feedback" forum, then make it a child forum of Announcements category.

I can only assume your forum is just a general discussions forum. In that case, then you could merge loads of forums into just one General Discussions forum, under a Community category. Maybe have some subforums for popular topics, such as politics, Art/Photography (could rename this to Creativity), Entertainment (could include one or two subforums for Movies and Television if you wanted) and maybe an Anime/Manga section as well.

But I have no idea what your forum is about as it seems to cover several niches.

^thanks guys. It is a general purpose forum and I have been getting alot of the same feedback that we have too many forums. I need to evaluate which ones we can combine.

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I was able to get rid and move some of the forums around. Still some work to be dont, but I appreciate all the help

nice structure.
that grey background could be nicer as white.
you need to change all those vbulletin default image for avatar, forum icons etc.
good luck pal.

Thanks webcosmo. We did try white, but to us it just looked a bit plain. How do you go about changing the images? I am a complete newb so please bear with me.

less is more sometimes, empty could express better sometimes:)

you can simply upload the new favicon to replace the existing one.

for other images this is the simplest method IMO
- find the location and name of those icons using firefox > copy image location > paste on a text editor.
- replace the old icon with a new icon
- make sure to save the new icons in a separate place, so when you upgrade you can replace the icons again.

btw your header is really big IMO. Less height could look better.

Thanks, I will give it a try

Some new changes, any thoughts?

I don't know if it changes if you register but the 'logo' image at the top is huge for simply being 2 pennies it wastes a lot of space... netbooks are becoming common place for viewing forums these days and screen real-estate is at a premium... it just seems like a tremendous waste for just a logo.

Good point, didnt even think about that

logo is huge

no easy way in to forums thats easily visible.

forum link when found opens in new tab

so many advertisements

when clicking "logon screen" I get the malware warning from Chrome

Oh yeah, the ads are pretty rough... I visited it with adblock on so didn't notice at first but wondered why there was an empty box next to the logo...

I don't think displaying twice the ads brings in twice the revenue... I used to have a google ad on top and bottom of my forum, I removed the top one and my income only dropped about 10%- I don't know how google calculates it but you could probably cut back a lot and not see a big change.

Learn how to properly place ads other than that nice site.

Thanks, yea currently we are trying to sources of ads and I agree its a bit much. We just upgraded the servers so hopefully everything will load quicker. Anyone to verify?

Took away some of the ads, focusing on the deal by amazon. Also, finally imaged over to new faster servers. Still a work in process but appreciate all the feedback, it has been extremely helpful

Not bad at all.. Nice try..!! just try to come with a creative theme. It will look even more superb.
But one thing which is amazing is your site speed.. Its loading extremely fast. Thats a good one.

Thanks, the new servers really made a difference. The theme we defiantly want to change. It is boring, just not sure where to find some good skins.

You can always ask someone to create a theme for you. :)