Please review my site.

[Cindy]

I have recently upgraded my phpbb forum to vBulletin and was wondering if I could have an opinion or two :)

What do you think about the choice of forums, layout, colour scheme and discussion?

Thanks heaps for taking your time,
Cindy

http://www.nettrafficchat.com

[boron]

:)
Choise of forums is your choise and can be discussed on your forum by asking members.
You have one "spamer" and one "scammer" category - which can lead someone to think you are a sc.& sp. warrior :)
"Private" categories won't push visitors to join and see what's so private inthere :) (Not only my opinion on this matter).

You made a title netrafichat from "design purposes" I guess, but I spent some time to figure out isn't it a mistake. Did you try with original title? Also: the empty "cloud" calls for some content...

Green part of layout is OK, but it doesn't fit with that partricular grayish-blue.

I would try to move the menu below the header if possible.
Date on the top - can you move it somewhere - toward login area?

It's a clean, smooth layout, I like this a lot.

Your Trafficbunnies banner is more designed and prominent as your header...
Welcome message - I would omit it - only general info is there.

This is the first look review only. I would think about the whole top area - to be clean, clear and elements in this order (from the top):
1.header
2.menu
3. place for banner - yours and a sponsor one
4. login field
5.board (I like the bord is side to side).

About discussion. Some threads have no answers, but OK, this is the mater of how many posters are there. Webmaster forum must run an useful conversation - in sense - "solving problems + sharing opportunitiers" to prosper. Chatting or more private part is what will maybe make someone "dedicated". You have strong marketing categories - you need posters who will put good experience, proofs there, make offers.

Waiting for your and others' comments, can continue then.

[Sam]

1. The Design
It loads a tad slow for me, and I think it's quite bland. But as you most likely know, that's all a matter of taste and in my opinion design is of no real importance.

For the rest, I agree with Boron. Don't set the forums to private, this does not stimulate them in any way to register at your forum.

[Cindy]

Ok, first thing I know to fix is the whole private forums thing. I had it recommended to me to do it this way, but don't think it's really doing much to promote sign ups.

The rest is kind of tricky to do. I will probably take a week getting through all of this stuff.. lol.

Thanks for taking the time to have a look, and I welcome any more of your comments.

Cindy

[boron]

@ "Private" : Visitor comes, clicks here and there and knows if forum is "yes or no". If I can't see content I don't register "by default".

@ Design and moving menus and other: Ask some coder, designer, I guess this is the most painless way.

We can discuss about SEO here, if you want. Any particular needs?

[Reckless]

making the forum private is not that smart, people want to see what the site is about. (i see you changed it already)

the design look alright, but the space next to your logo looks a bit empty.

the bottom of the site looks a bit weird:
http://img185.imageshack.us/img185/4364/naamlooswu1.jpg

btw i would change your title into something like this: PublisherForums.com - Intelligent Discussion for Web Publishers

[Submerge]

The template looks pretty nice; however, everything is a tad too large for me.

[boron]

With which keywords do you advertise the forum? I guess you put a strong accent on "traffic". "Webmaster", "buy/sell domains", "review sites" and some usual attractive keyword phrases from forum discussions also wouldn't harm your forum.

Here is interesting keyword analyzis (http://www.submitexpress.com/cgi-bin/analyzer/meta.pl?url=http://www.nettrafficchat.com/) of your forum's Home page, which shows that usernames, "last post" and such become keywords...Post titles seems to be important.

[Cindy]

Thanks guys :)

I have made a few changes. There are no private forums anymore, which is pretty good :)

I removed the mp3 player, which was making it look too green.

I also got rid of that weird thing down the bottom (thanks Reckless)... Am not even sure how I fixed that - it had been bothering me for days - and then I fixed something else and it's all better!

Also, I appreciate your SEO tips Boron. I haven't really given SEO much consideration at the moment, but guess it's nearly time to start thinking about it. That site was a great one! I checked my other site - trafficbunnies.com and that did a bit better - see - http://www.submitexpress.com/cgi-bin/analyzer/meta.pl?url=http://www.trafficbunnies.com/

I need to look into the robots meta tag, and the author one too. Any hints on meta tags? I don't know anything about them.

Cindy

[boron]

Robot tags, Meta tags and author tags are on the bottom of importance for SEO, especially for meta tags was said that G/Y/NSN ignore them totaly.

About your Trafficbunnies.com the most important are keywords - onsite and in anchor text of your backlinks or in forum signatures. Put your URL in http://backlinkwatch.com , anchor text of all of your backlinks is shown.

Robot tags can help to index your site quicker, but you can do this better way with creating a Sitemap and submit it in Gogle and Yahoo (http://publisherforums.com/showthread.php?t=501&highlight=sitemap).

[Cindy]

ok - thanks - will put it on tomorrows to-do list :)

[boron]

I've just seen it today - what did you do to get all of those new members? Your "24 hour members" list in the footer resembles that one on DP :D .

[Cindy]

LOL! Yeah, it went a little crazy for a while the other day! I have a friend who owns stickem.com and sent out a message to a few people... lol.

I think it's settled down now - and I think the servers are a little happy for it! I had about 10,000 uniques in the 48 hour period! Am sorting out a plan to send members over, but not quite in that kind of flooding numbers.

[boron]

So, stickem.com you say? I guess few members here are very interested about how to get posters...There were one very original question on your forum: How many PR10 sites exist, how many PR9 and so on. Now aswer if you can :)