anyone have any pointers to offer?

[Sean S]

Well seeing your site now, I could make a few suggestions. First of all, I would recommend making your ads a bit more organized. Having two ads like that overlapping at the very top of the forum not only is unattractive to the viewers, but it will show the guests and members that you care more about making money than actually what you have to offer to them.

My advice to you is to use a ad management system that would display random ads at the top with different sizes rather than having them pile up on each other and take space.

Second of all, forum alone would make it 3 times harder for you to attract members who would visit. Think the way your members might think, why would they, out of the thousands of other website/forums in your category wanna join in your forums and stay there. A few things that would highly increase your traffic would be to open a main site that would publish a few articles or news and give some for the members to read, some useful downloads might help too. Forum alone will make the work harder on your part, cause then you have to compete to win over members from sites that have a good site with content up and also have a forum.

And last, I hope you did not pay too much for that "custom" skin, as that skin (Fibe) was originally designed by me and sold to pixelmunkies at http://www.pixelmunkies.com/product....2&cat=1&page=1

best of luck,
Sean