[Skipsoutdoors]

That was kind of what I did with the reason the forum home displays the categories and forums in a list as opposed to all the forums. Our load times are pretty fast given what we are serving. I went through it in the spring and dropped my bandwidth usage by 1/3 doing it the way I did it by taking the images off the forum home and still keeping the category tabs having related forums and listing like they used to on forum home, just less forums. Those little arrows and bullet points and locks and such aren't much but by the time they load 57 times each on forum home it's a lot too much.

The colors are a little wild, but at one time we had a camo background. It was too difficult to load so the idea was to create a background with camo colors in html. I also like the fact that it's a fairly distinctive color set. That way it doesn't look like the other 6,799 hunting forums on the net.

The traffic's not the issue. Google screwing me on payment for their ads is.

The way I look at it is this. I buy ads for my daytime business in a local news paper. An ad of any reasonable size costs $150 or so. This newspaper has about 3500 subscribers and publishes weekly or 4 times a month. There are roughly 45 pages to the newspaper and no guarantee that all of the 3500 people will see my ad. More to the point, most people who read a newspaper only read about 1/3 of the paper. So if my ad is in the sports section, the people who read the headlines, business news, and lifestyle section do not see it.

With close to 6000 uniques viewing per month, that's equivalent to a newspaper with nearly twice the number of subscribers as the News Journal I advertise in. Those 6000 people make about 30,000 visits on the website in a month. Roughly equivalent to twice the size of the newspaper's monthly reads from subscribers. Those same subscribers viewed 700,000 pages this month - way above the newspaper's rate. The advantage of this style advertising is since the same ad blocks appear on every page, people can't miss them. It's not like I put google's ad in the Georgia Land Lease forum and it only got viewed by 150 people this week.

If Google would advertise something hunters would be interested in IE: Treestands, bows, etc they might get a little more activity. I don't know any hunter that's interested in a bullet proof vest that Google insists on advertising.

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