Review my site I started from scratch. The old one had 5000 uniques a day.

Yeah, I decided to wipe out all of the old website and start from scratch. I had hundreds of articles and was getting 5000+ uniques a day. I slowly watched my hits dwindle to less that 100 a day already, haha. But I wanted to do something I was rather interested in and had knowledge on.

Anyways, I turned it into basically a forums/downloads / webmasters resource site.

Don't be too critical I guess.


www.therantandrave.net

 

looks nice but loaded a bit slowly for me...I'm on firefox.
how did you get all those visitors in the past - mainly articles you mentioned? just curious.

good luck my friend

 

I did a lot of SEO and promotion through social bookmarking and social networking sites. I used google trends for many articles that I did also. I am just not sure where to start on promoting a site like this. I am about to setup a blog for it to do articles on related to this and lots of tutorials and link them all back to the forums.

I wish I can find a staff team to help. Haha.

 

Forums look good, header is too big and not woking well.

 

I have the header imaged compressed. It was the repeating background image behind it that was causing the load time. I removed that, I totally forgot about it. Heh. I have spent 3 days or so customizing, designing and modding the board. I am trying to add as many downloads, books, tutorials and tools as possible. If anyone would like to help, feel free and pm me. I could use it. Heh.

Also if anyone has any articles, tutorials and/or e-books you wrote, I will put them up for you with all rights to you of course and I would direct it and link to you or your sites.


Please keep leaving feed back!

 

I like the clean look the forum has, very professional looking.

If you have articles elsewhere (in your blog for instance) make "discuss" links to your forum all over the place. I know it can be hard to get a forum going.

Tom

 

Ah that is a really good idea. Thanks dude!

 

the menu at left seem so small. its so hard to read that

 

It can't be any bigger for it will make the forums smaller.

 

I don't like your template very much it isn't too colorful. Also your forum doesn't have a lot of people in it. Hopefully it will grow though.

 

I don't want it to be too colorful. A basic design and template is best for user attraction, dark colors are harsh on the eyes and draw users away, to many colors are just overwhelming. And like I stated, it is new as of a day ago so of course there aren't many members.

Anyways an update, I enlarged the font sizes for the links in the sidebar.

 

Consider canging the links in left side from Red color to Hex : #004572 or any bluish...

I dont like your header, make it small and clear... too big to see

 

Thanks, I figured a big nice header would be neat. But I will see how it looks resized.