I'm the first to admit I need some help with this military forum. How do I improve it. Do you have any ideas, any recommendations for advertising? I'm having difficulty in starting discussion and getting new users. While there's a small amount of action, it hasn't changed much. Let me know how to get this moving a little.
Forums can be one of the most difficult types of sites to start. A lot of people pay people to come post at first, so it can build up traffic, sort of jump start it. I like the design, but viewing it on 1680 x 1050, the 765px width comes across as pretty small, whereas sites like DP takes up the entire screen. This makes it a lot harder to view...
Any idea how I go about getting rid of the undlerining on all the text now, no idea where that came about.
The forum is well designed however, I think you should replace the favicon icon with your own, and I think the header is a little too large it would look better if you made it smaller. You can promote the forum through article marketing and press release distribution.
Do you mean the underlines under the forum title and recent post sections on the first page? It is in your css, probably something to the effect of this (vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1569878) , but there are tons of google results for it. Personally I think it makes it easier to read. This is the way DP does it as well.
The banner has been made smaller as recommended. I left the underlines if they're really easier to read. Anything else?
For me, you background color is too dark. What i feel is that users stay will be short in your site. If you look at user friendly, popular sites (facebook, msn, google, gmail, cnn, bbc, ebay, amazon, paypal, etc... ) almost all of them are using white or light (Mostly light blue) colored themes.