I have a new website that I launched about a month ago, it is still under development in some sections but has received many members and posts in the forums amounting up to more than 800 threads and 2,000 posts in one month. If you could review my Developer site with constructive criticism I will be more than happy to leave rep as well. Here are some details: Community: The community is still under development, but it will be a large developer social community. You can list your websites, join communities, and tag others. Forums: The Developer and IT Forums consist of many resourceful categories. Software Development, Web Development, Game Development, IT Development, Marketplace with our very own Social Bookmark exchange Forum!. We also have a Lobby for those just hanging out. Each and everyone one of our Developer forums are intricately named and precisely configured, you can find each topic there. Interviews: We have here exclusive interviews from different professional developers including bloggers, gamers, webmasters, software engineers, IT professionals, marketers, SEO experts, Directory owners, and affiliates. Articles: The Articles or Blog section of the site consists of useful articles or resources related to development. Be sure to check it out, it will help. Reviews (Awards): The Reviews or Awards section is still under development. Basically we have categories of websites including blog guides, social networking, business, development, etc. and we rank the Top 3 sites and give them awards based on different nominations. Oh and by the way, you don't need to criticize on the design because I am hiring a professional designer to work on that.
In all honesty i'm not real crazy about it. It appears to be a cookie-cutter website. You should probably get a custom design to be able to get a decent review.
I see the main problem is the design, I'm hiring a professional designer but he hasn't been on for awhile.
Since you wanted comments on the site itself rather than the design, here goes... As far as the forums go, you have a good selection of sections and topics - this may sound silly, but i've always looked at the order of forums as being indicative of the priority given to them; so in the case of your site, general chit chat seems more important than the other topics; which BST ranks lowest. Its probably nothing major and likely doesn't make a difference to most people, but its something you could perhaps play around with. If at all possibly, personally, I would try to have the subforums show up in-line rather than as a list, as this adds would cut down on how much your visitors need to scroll to get to where they want. When using an out-of-the-box CMS like vBa CMPS you're always going to be limited when it comes to the layout of your site. I would personally get rid of the current contents of the right-hand column and replace it with seperate boxes for newest discussions, most popular discussions, as well as links to specific interviews and articles. Again this is all just my personal opinion, but I hope it helps in some way.
Thanks, yes the CMPS looks terrible I know, but that all comes with the design when it is ready. Also I will try separating the sub forums in columns and see how that looks. About the general arrangement of the forums I will leave that as is.