Blues Brothers Central - The Soul Food Cafe
 

Hi fellow vBulletin users (and vBulletin fans :P)

I'd love to see if anyone has any comments/suggestions about my forum, the Soul Food Cafe.

You'll find it at http://www.bluesbrotherscentral.com/forum/

To try to build a better sense of integration with the Blues Brothers movie, I've named several parts of my site after locations in the film.
The Soul Food Cafe is my forum, Bob's Country Bunker is my chatroom, Ray's Music Exchange is my online store (haven't come up with anything for my games arcade, but that's not a big deal yet).

I've completely customized my forum style from the default vBulletin style. I tried to change as much of it using CSS as possible before I started editing templates, I'm happy to say I only had to edit 19 templates to achieve this look (and 6 of those are from mods anyway). So unlike my previous theme I won't need to waste an hour manually updating templates every time a new vBulletin is released :)

Forum activity was heavily down in December, but after sending out a few newsletters and redesigning the site I've started to see activity pick up again. In fact Google Analytics says I now have double the visitors!

Advertising is a combination of Amazon Associates and Google Adsense, although some of the advertising only displays to unregistered members.

I'm using vBSEO to improve forum performance, it's definitely had an impact on my search engine rankings. I'm now the #3 site in Google when searching for "Blues Brothers" (only behind IMDB and Wikipedia, 2 sites I'll probably never beat :P) I should add that the official website is #4 in Google :)

If anyone wants to take a quick look at my forum and let me know if they see any problems or annoyances, or if they have any ideas for improvements please feel free to post them here.
I always find it easier to get feedback from outsiders who are viewing the forum for the first time, even if it's negative.

What do you like and what don't you like? What am I doing wrong and right?

Any feedback at all would be most appreciated :)

I think the Theme of your site is excellent! It really brings home the mesage of what your community is about.

I give it a rating of 10 out of 10. ...wouldn't chnage at thing! ;)

Pure awesomeness. I am sure I will be a member of your site!!!!

"It's got cop tires, cop suspension, cop shocks. Its a model made before catalytic converters so it will run good on regular gas."

Makes me want to go watch the movie now.

Wow, thanks both of you! :D

I honestly wasn't expecting that I've done everything right, I'm a little bit surprised :P

Well I think now I'll leave my forum alone for a while and concentrate on finishing my main website, www.bluesbrotherscentral.com

I'm 97% finished a complete rebuild of that, hopefully it will drive more traffic to the forums :)