BirdieChance.co.uk - Golf Forum

[bbcentral]

That's a nice forum!
I like your custom forum icons, they work really well. And so does the background image!

I'd personally change your forum title, at the moment your site is called "BirdieChance.co.uk/forums", which is a URL rather than a proper title.

What about calling your forum simply "Birdie Chance"? (Or "BirdieChance" if you prefer).

I like your concept for the logo, but it still doesn't quite do it for me. It's tough work, logo's are what I've always struggled with. I have no idea how to use Photoshop, so I create all my graphics in Fireworks, which works alright for me.

I wonder if there's a way to do something about the header image. You want your logo to be instantly recognizable by people, so you can develop a bit of a "brand". The only thing I can come up with right now (after 2 days with no sleep that is :P) is to find a photo similar to the middle one in the header, one that shows a real flag on a golf course. And then put your logo over the top of it, with the text to the side. It's a little hard to explain, I can see the image in my head but I can't quite describe it :P

If I get a chance I might knock something together for you, just a quick 2 minute proof of concept. And I also place a strong emphasis on how fast the page loads, nothing worse than a forum with a 200KB header image!

The guys at vBSEO.com wrote this awesome article on boosting your site's search engine optimization:
http://www.vbseo.com/f45/your-site-r...o-first-23762/
Obviously ignore the section on "vBSEO Tweaks" and "Supporting Software", those don't apply (not worth spending the money on vBSEO just yet).

I'd recommend reading:
Forum Design
Forum Template Edits / Navigation
Keyword Improvement
Help From Google

Those will be extremely useful to you. Not all of them will apply, but you might be able to boost your traffic. Especially running Google Analytics, which may be the coolest free software ever released :P
I wanted to find out if I would have any trouble switching my site from an 800x600 to 1024x768 resolution based design. So I logged into Analytics and created a report, and I found out only 3% of my visitors were using 800x600 resolution still. And then I narrowed it down, most of those people were not members.
It's also great if you're putting links to your forum around the place and you want to be able to track where everyone's coming from, what countries, what browsers, what search engine keywords etc.

I've just spent 2 months learning about all these things, and my visitors have gone from 600 to 1000 a day now, it's obvious you really want your forum to succeed and I'd love to see you make it happen

Edit: Well it didn't really turn out too well, but I think it shows what I want it to:
Attachment 95649

I'm really not that good when it comes to graphics, I'm more of a programming guy :P