Review my forum setup

[Borzog]

Hi,

I'm wondering if people would mind reviewing my forum setup. I haven't started getting members yet, but I need people to tell me how this would look if I submitted it to the public. Please rate these things:

Theme - For the blog and the forum(which currently I haven't put a new theme on);
Forum setup - Are the categories and forums I have describing themselves well? Anything I should add or maybe remove?;
Colors and Ranks - rank images, rank colors, group colors - anything I can do to improve?;
And anything else you would like to rate.
The forum is at http://general.x10.bz/forum/ and the blog is at http://general.x10.bz/

Thanks x10 Community. If you wanna join the site, go ahead, but this isn't a publicity thing. I just wanna see how my site is looking right now.

 

[SierraAR]

Well, first up, it may be helpful if we had a link to your forum

 

[Borzog]

Sorry, I knew I'd forget something :/

 

[SierraAR]

No problem. I'll take a look, write down some notes, and let you know what I think.

---------- Post added at 11:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:23 PM ----------

Alright, so after taking a brief look at both URL's you supplied, I have this for you: It's pretty empty and bland, and rather broad.

In regards to your forum, you're still using the default theme, and you seem to have no idea what your forums general purpose is. You have subforums for just about everything. However, the ordering of your categories is actually quite good, except for your staff applications. I would have those at the top. I would also condense it into one subforum for all staff positions, and have users include the position they are applying for in their post.

You're lacking in content right now, but you already said you haven't gotten to that so there's not much point in addressing that.

Rank/position colors really depend on the current theme. With the default theme, the light gray and bright yellow colors are not the best choices. I would recommend using colors that are complimentary to the colors of your theme for staff, as well, to make them more noticeable. Try using italics and bold to help differentiate, if you don't have many colors to choose from.

Looking at your blog now, it looks very professional, but also somewhat bland. The color balance is also off, as you have three menus on one side with color, and almost no color anywhere else.

I'm also wondering about your site's title 'General'. It makes it seem as if your blog is using the default header/title and hasn't had any effort put in to change that yet.

I hope this helps you.

 

[essellar]

Two things struck me right away:

1) The link from your blog to your forum loads and renders a WordPress page before redirecting, and that feels a little bit dangerous -- the user sees what appears to be the front page of the "real" forum and is just waiting for the forum section list to load, then their browser is "hijacked" to your actual forum. That's the kind of behaviour that people are used to seeing just before the scareware virus scan warnings start popping up all over the place. Make the forum link on your blog a direct link to the forum instead, and you'll avoid the panic response.

2) Once you're in the forum, there is no obvious way to get back to the blog.

On a stylistic note, you might want to use a phpBB theme that's a closer colour match to your blog -- that will give the users a better idea that the two applications (the news/blog and the forum) are connected.

 

[SierraAR]

Ahh, I've noticed asmall issue with your forum. I don't have permission to post new topics