Hello, I was wondering if I could get a few reviews of my website in exchange for some rep points! I will still give rep even if you say bad things, I am looking for criticism, not praise, although I welcome both. www.VerbalBattle.com Has been registered for about a month now, little less. I originally had it running on community server and had 52 members and over 850 posts and just got disatisfied with the software, so I took it down knowing full well I would loose all the messages and probably members. I did this Saturday morning and had the site as it is now up and running by Saturday afternoon. Already I have got 23 members and 185 posts, not even a full 48 hours yet. I have also not done any advertising, it is all being done via word of mouth and form my signature in forums I belong to. At the start of next month I will be spending some money on advertsing to see what results I can get from that and also trying to find someone to make me a custom skin for the site. Looking forward to your posts
Nice Idea, the forum has plenty of different sections and everyone likes to argue so I would say you cannot fail to get traffic and members on your site. If the discussion ever dries up try paying for forum posts (it shouldn't cost much because its an easy thing to talk about, arguing) but you should be OK. You should be able to get some good backlinks from sites, eg. you start a thread about a piece of news and then people can talk about that piece of news and people will link to your site saying "join the debate here..." or whatever. I would do something with the front page, it's a bit scary to be honest and reminds me of the old internet. Perhaps make the text regular not bold, removed the tank and the parental advisory pictures, take away the black background etc. Just make it a little nicer to look at, perhaps get a picture that would suit with your topics, and keep it nice and clean looking. Hope that suits your requirements...
Thanks monty! I appreciate it. I did just throw the home page together rather quickly to have a landing page. I am hoping to also pay someone to make a new one for me towards the end of the month, something eye catching and that gives some description as to what the site is about. Rep added!
Provocative subjects - They should bring users - it works for talk radio. Why not post a few more controversial topics - maybe even take on a registered persona to wind people up into wanting to post themselves? That will move things along. I liked the forum, but the intro page needs a little work. To tell the truth, I usually move on when I see enter here holding pages, or flash intros. Good luck with the forum.
Thanks for the comments Peter, I actually worked all morning redoing the intro page. I am hoping to get a free comments on it, whether people think it will work or not to keep visitors there. Rep added Pete, thank again
I'll skip the home page design aspects since you'll be re-doing that (a good idea, no doubt) but try to touch on a few key things... For the text, I'd personally switch to Arial, and I'd definitely set it to left align or justified instead of center. Centered paragraphs really annoy me! I'd probably shorten the whole intro, too, and have it so that there's a join button above the fold. I really like having lists of top debates and such, but I'd use smaller pictures so a user doesn't have to scroll so much. I'd go with 10 listings, but group them closer so it takes up less space than the 5 you list now. And use bigger borders or something so that different parts are "blocked" together. With everything being white, it kind of runs together. The header takes up a lot of valuable space for all it is. Plus, it doesn't span across a widescreen monitor while the rest of the page does. That little problem really makes things look like crap. The forum page looks pretty good, although I don't like that big split across the middle. I'd rather see Adsense at the very top with a matching background color. And maybe have the PayPal button somewhere else, because there's no way I'd donate anything before getting a chance to see the forums. Speaking of forums, there are a lot of options for only 27 members. I'd at least try to combine some of the non-core forums such as "general chitchat" and "cool things online" There you go, a whole slew of things I don't like
Well, the design is good and simple. But the pictures are very large, you have to resize the pictures, and add some mouse click, mouse on events, to become more user friendly.
I like the concept. I was thinking of launching a "fight forum" a few months ago but my main forum seems to have enough of that Anyway, my criticisms : #1 - The splash page should be coded in XHTML and CSS instead of using all those messy table tags (see the source code of BlogRateDirectory in my signature). Don't listen to the person who said to use onmouseover or onmouseout javascript, it's just more mess that you don't need in your source code. You can accomplish all that in CSS. #2 - The forum definitely needs a skinned theme and a logo. Here's a few of my newest forums as examples: http://forum.tattootattoo.info/ - using modified Back-n-Black theme by Crip http://www.baseballtalkpro.com/forum/ - using Dirtylicious, but I modified it all up and down to add the team rankings by standings, etc... #3 - Turn off the "Karma" - You will lose members because of it (trust me) #4 - Good move allowing signatures. I set my max signature size to 600 or 1000 from the default 300 in SMF. I generally will not join or support a forum that doesn't allow signatures. #5 - Add your RSS channels to the bottom of your forum. If you PM me I can send you a link to another forum I run that has examples that you can just copy and paste the code. Also, you need some smilies to replace the default SMF ones... http://www.big-boards.com/smileys.php I joined your forum, you can join one of my forums and I'll zip you up my smiley and avatar sets so you can just upload them in the /Smileys and /Avatars directory if you don't know how to update them in SMF.... btw, if you need any help with SMF, PM me.
As sana said ur site seems very interesting In my openion the colour used are quite amazing.The images under politics, freedom and others too are very nice.The border colour is good but if u give a light pink or light black then it will be more interesting and fascinating.Though its looking pretty good but it will be more attractive then.Thats just my openion rest u have to think over it.But really done a great job.Really i like it.
The homepage is dead set ugly. But the forums are nice looking. So maybe scrap the homepage and make verbalbattle.com go directly to forums?
The homepage is the main page of the site, but yours doesn't quite look like that. I think you need a few improvements to your template or maybe get a new one. The images that you have used are fine and are not pixelated which is great. The overall loading of the site seems fine. You have the adsense ads near the bottom of the page, for monetizing your website, you may earn more if they are nearer to the top of the page as a majority of your visitors will probably not scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. Hope that helps and good luck.