DSLR-User

[JollyJack]

I needed a hobby last year and found photography, i am still very new and always need alittle advice, there are a few photography forums around, but i found they are sometimes at a higher level than i am, i started dslr-user to maybe get a few experts to help out us newbies and to give us some great advice along the way.

Please have a look, its new, tell me if i have the right forums there or what i need to change to get people to come and help and share.

http://www.dslr-user.com/forums

all advice welcome

[Taragon]

It seems you've changed above URL to http://www.dslr-user.com/forum/. It being a fairly new forum, may I suggest installing (changing) both vBadvanced and your forum to root? This for SEO purposes. (don't forget to edit your meta keywords and description btw.)

I have to say I like the used logo, although I'm not really sure about the font used..
The scrolling affiliates bar is a little bit annoying though.
Also, you might wish to change your forum icons to png or something transparent.

As this will be a forum based on photography I suggest making your album features more known. Perhaps even the whole profile page.

As proper content will be the key to have a successful forum I can only suggest doing that. Also, make sure vBadvanced will be rich of relative content, not only the latest threads made.

[TruthElixirX]

Originally Posted by Taragon

It seems you've changed above URL to http://www.dslr-user.com/forum/. It being a fairly new forum, may I suggest installing (changing) both vBadvanced and your forum to root? This for SEO purposes. (don't forget to edit your meta keywords and description btw.)

Since when does that need to be done for SEO purposes? Care to cite sources?

[Taragon]

Let me rephrase that a little bit, by giving an example:

When you categorize your files on your harddrive, you often place all of your files in a directory first. Or when you have a numerous amount of files in several subdirectories. This all to avoid mixture with other files already there.

Now, let's say you don't have any other files to worry about. Why put it in a subdir then?

This same goes for search engines crawling your website. They prefer to go to [minicode]http://mypage.com/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode] instead of [minicode]http://mypage.com/some-dir-name-which-will-only-be-used-once/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode].

I agree, I am perhaps overstating things as there are more important things to worry about like content. However, when seeing a starting website I do think it should be mentioned as it will be almost impossible to do in the future.

[JollyJack]

It seems you've changed above URL to http://www.dslr-user.com/forum/. It being a fairly new forum, may I suggest installing (changing) both vBadvanced and your forum to root?

How do i run both from root?

[Taragon]

- In the admincp change your forum index.php to something like forum.php
- Via ftp rename the forum index.php to something like forum.php
- Transfer the forum dir into root
- In the admincp change your vbadvanced cmps_index.php to index.php
- Via ftp rename the vbadvanced cmps_index.php to index.php

I'm at work atm, so I can't give you the exact admincp locations, but something like that.

PS. delete your forum dir only when you're sure things are working.

[BSMedia]

Originally Posted by Taragon

Let me rephrase that a little bit, by giving an example:

When you categorize your files on your harddrive, you often place all of your files in a directory first. Or when you have a numerous amount of files in several subdirectories. This all to avoid mixture with other files already there.

Now, let's say you don't have any other files to worry about. Why put it in a subdir then?

This same goes for search engines crawling your website. They prefer to go to [minicode]http://mypage.com/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode] instead of [minicode]http://mypage.com/some-dir-name-which-will-only-be-used-once/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode].

I agree, I am perhaps overstating things as there are more important things to worry about like content. However, when seeing a starting website I do think it should be mentioned as it will be almost impossible to do in the future.

Sorry it doesn't work like that. Folders are for organizational purposes and should be used to declare different parts of a web site. Forums should be placed into a forums folder. Don't build your site for the moment, think months down the road and you'll eventually want a front page on the site possibly even a blog (preferably). The blog should be the main part of the site to post articles to and draw users in (in the site root). Then to keep things neat and clean the forums should be placed in a /forums folder to declare they are a seperate but equally important part of the site.

Hence the reason, thousands, upon thousands of forums are installed in a subfolder/subdomain of the actual domain. Unless of course the forum is the only part of the website

[TruthElixirX]

Originally Posted by TruthElixirX

Since when does that need to be done for SEO purposes? Care to cite sources?

Originally Posted by Taragon

Let me rephrase that a little bit, by giving an example:

When you categorize your files on your harddrive, you often place all of your files in a directory first. Or when you have a numerous amount of files in several subdirectories. This all to avoid mixture with other files already there.

Now, let's say you don't have any other files to worry about. Why put it in a subdir then?

This same goes for search engines crawling your website. They prefer to go to [minicode]http://mypage.com/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode] instead of [minicode]http://mypage.com/some-dir-name-which-will-only-be-used-once/forum-title/thread-title[/minicode].

I agree, I am perhaps overstating things as there are more important things to worry about like content. However, when seeing a starting website I do think it should be mentioned as it will be almost impossible to do in the future.

You didn't read my post.

Originally Posted by TruthElixirX

Since when does that need to be done for SEO purposes? Care to cite sources?

You cite no sources and just shoot from the hip. I can claim equally ludicrous things.