Just a new "hobby" site of mine I set for up talking about sports. Any feedback welcome - seo, design, navigation, etc. www.sports-chat.com I went with VBulletin for the forums - have been really impressed with this and the other VBulletin forums I participate in. Also, the site just went live on 4/27/04, so I know I need links
From the design side - it looks nice and clean One suggestion would be to NOT center the menu options. I think it would fit better with the rest of the page and be easier to read if left-aligned. Something though (and I have not figured it out) is the red/blue lines combination... granted it might just be my eyes.. but maybe tone down the red a little?? ~MC ION Web Design
I shifted the menu options to the left. I'm going to try it on for awhile and see how I like it. At first glance, I like it a lot better. Thanks for the suggestion.
I would put a sports news feed on your Sports Chat .....uh huh....in finding the thread for you about rss feeds I found....Guyfromchicago!!! Lol! BTW I found the zfeeder cool and easy to install PS like the link?
Very clear design. I'm kinda with foxy - are there many sports chat forums around ? If so, you'll need something different to get people there. It's interesting about forums. For example SEO - I trawl seo-chat, seo-guy and this one. I actually think this is the better as it's at a slighly higher level. I enjoy seochat but there's always a lot of newbies, which I was some months ago so I am not knocking it, but as you move forward you want the forums to as well - and that's where I think this is. seo-guy is brilliant because of Morgan's wit and charm (Mr seo-guy) Anyway, you probably need something else for people to check back on in addition to the forum.
Thanks for the idea. I've actually been thinking about an RSS feed. The site just kind of happened, I didn't have any "plan" for it before it went up. Most of the sports forums I've been to have either been poorly moderated (not that a sports forum requires a lot of moderation), not used often, or slow and awkward to use. I like sports, and VBulletin is the best forum software I've come across. Mix those two elements with a little free time, and bam, sports-chat.com I think I'll play around with zfeeder today. The site's a work in progress - any and all feedback is welcome. PS links are good
I agree. Any ideas? I like the RSS feed idea, and on another forum someone had posted that I should include a photo gallery for members to upload pics. I thought that was little redundant, as you can post pics in the forum itself.
I suppose you can't be all things to all people - for sports news you would generally go to the news pages or a news service? How about asking on your forum what people want.
How about a contest of some sort? We do that in stock picking forums. Have people pick the winners in advance of games, golf events or whatever. You keep the standings, then they'll come back and see how they are doing and discuss it in the forum. It would be nice to offer something to the winner, but that isn't really even necessary. It's more a battle of egos.
Yeah I was just going to suggest a "betting" idea as it sort of ties in with the rss feeds - which you can be quite specific on [eg sport specific] I believe
Thank you all for the feedbakc. I put in an RSS feed (still need to tweak a little) and have put some small incentives in place for people to post. I'm working a few contests and some other ideas, a lot stemming from the ideas in this forum. Thanks again for the suggestions. If you have a site that relates to sports in any way this may be of interest to you: http://sports-chat.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30
GuyFromChicago I'm having problems with my subscriptions to zfeeder - did you encounter this? They will not update - will not allow me to write - and my permissions are OK!
No, I really didn't run into any problems. What subscriptions are you using? I'm just using two from Yahoo and one from ESPN.
Thanks GuyFC Methinks it is the ISP as I have validated the rss feeds as well - so I will send them a missive.
One other thing - I tried a few different feeds and didn't think they were updating, but they were…it was just that the source didn't have any fresh info so the same results kept being displayed. That's why I ended up settling for the Yahoo & ESPN feeds - content updated often.
Just wanted to thank everyone for the great feedback regarding my site/forum. I took a lot of the suggestions and ran with them - RSS feed (using zfeeder, very impressed with how easy it was for novice like myself to set up), free advertising promotion, post incentives and a couple of other things. I even started up a small Adwords campaign that's delivered a few visitors. I went ahead and picked up a few text-link ads (very inexpensive) of some related sites also. I've been getting a small amount of traffic for the first week (50+ unique a day) and hope to continue to improve on that. Not much along the lines of registered users yet, but I'll keep plugging away on that front as well. For any other Forum owners, I also came across a site/forum called TheAdminZone. It's a forum/site for webmasters who run forums. It's a pretty active board, and lots of the members have some very good ideas. Keep the suggestions coming - and thanks again for all the input so far.