MumsOnline - Where Parents Talk! - please review

[tokenyank]

Hiya folks...

I know I will probably regret asking this, but could I get some 'outside' views on my site please?

Background:
We've been going for just over 3 years and have a core member base of primarily women who are environmentally aware. As a site we are mindful of overbearing and "in your face" adverts which populate the majority of websites in this nich? so we've opted instead for 1 banner per page showing, primarily, WAHP (work at home parents) businesses that are also members of our site and 2 Adsense placements where are very unobtrusive (so much so we've earned like $100 in 2 years! ).

Also mindful of the stereotypical "baby/kid theme" of most parent boards, we've instead opted for a clean design using warm/neutral colours, steering away from the brilliant blues and pinks as well as baby toys and the like. We want(ed) our community to be a place where parents of children of all ages to feel at home, rather than to pigeon hole ourselves into a baby/kid/teen genre. This seems to have worked as we have members from parents to be to grandparents.

We've also tried to stay away from limiting the range of conversations that can be had by having many varied categories/forums. So, yes, there are things like weaning babies and teething problems, but we also have a news/debate section, entertainment, shopping, etc. And to this end, on any given day, there will be topics from what to do with a colicky baby to how the new UK smoking ban has affected our lives.

We believe in a very transparent policy in terms of the how our forum is run. Everything that happens is 'reported' to our members since we wouldn't be a community without them, we feel that it is only right to keep them informed or take on board their opinions/concerns when it comes to the day to day running of the board. We ask for donations once a year for 3 weeks to help cover our dedicated server costs, and whatever the short fall we cover the rest from our pockets. Again, believing that our members are there for community, not for charity.

We are fairly heavily indexed by major search engines and are a point of content for media outlets looking for participants for upcoming shows or the like and we've been approached by UK governmental agencies that deal with children. All of this without ever promoting ourselves and relying on the word of mouth of our members alone. (as of 2 weeks ago, we did our very first and probably last {depending on the success} paid advertising with vbulletin-fans.com)

All of this considered, we feel that our community is very good, however the 'bad points'.

We recently switched from Subdreamer which we found superb in the early days, but we needed something else as we've gotten bigger. Trying to keep all aspects of the site uniform, we have migrated to vBadvanced. Unfortunately, I do not know who to use the software fully yet so the homepage leaves much to be desired, however I'm still trying to pull Subdreamer artifacts from the forum itself. Since the forum is our 'bread and butter', I am concentrating on it more right now.

Most of what I know of php/html, I've learned by running this board. That is to say that whilst I'm fairly literate, there is no way I could function without the vb.org's community contributions. Our success is as much down to the modifications available here as anything else. In other words, we're quite heavily hacked!

Now, the reason I'm asking for this critique here is because I nominated our site on vb.com for BOTM thinking that there'd be feedback as to why a vote was cast. Never paid much attention to BOTM previously, my assumption was, well... An assumption. Since we've had few votes but no real reason why.

So, I turn to you, fellow vb affectionatos, take a gander at my site and tell me what you think. Be gentle, my wife has a gentle disposition, but tell us your thoughts anyway! (oh, and please ignore the homepage, as I said, I need to learn vBadvanced first )

Site:
http://www.mumsonline.net

Forums:
http://www.mumsonline.net/forums