Any Advice greatfully Received.

Hello I would love to hear any ideas that will help my forums grow. I have about 10,000 users at the moment, and it gets about 70,000 hits per day.

The CTR is always less than 1%, and between 0.3% and 0.5% is a good day for me.

I would really like to get 1% as this means I can change the way I work on the site. I would be able to finance a more serious effort at getting the sites up and running.

The forums are not accessed by the forums home page, and are accessed by other domains I have

The domain is GreeceMonkey Discussion Forums - Powered by vBulletin, but this url that would be accessed is Crete General Forums - GreeceMonkey Discussion Forums - this has forums abotu Crete, and forums about the resorts in Crete.

Iknow this is a long way off from being ready, and I intedn to take the next 6 months to make it in a better state, but I would really be interested to know how people think I can improve the general way the forums work, the URL, the layout - information about adsence, and maybe some mods, so I can position images to increase adsense.

I intend to have a header picture per forum soon, but this will also take time.

Graham

Holy sweet mother of..

I'm going to be honest, I clicked the link.. then when I realized I had to wait 10 minutes for the million of forums to load, I closed it.

First things first, you really need to address the number of forums being displayed at once. That's just.. wow. Most of which don't even have any posts in them.

Consolodate at first, then expand when there's a need.

Yea, but as I said none of the fourms are accessed from the frontpage, so it should never occur.

I dont agree with them being to big, as the file size, not including graphics listed by google is 63K, and SQL time for the 10 querys is 0.6 Seconds. Acording to google 83% of my users are DSL, so speed cant be an issue

I think that is exceptable, more so on forums, as people are more likely to wait 2 or 3 seconds.

This is on a dedicated server, with seperate DB server.

I run SQL slow query monitor, and in a week I have not had one single query take more than a second.

I agree to a point with expand when needed, but surely with forums it is different, as people will only use it if it is there. I cant expect people to email me and say we need a forum for xxx.

I thought it was a good idea to do it this way.

No question about it. WAY too many forums.

what shall I do then run seperate instances of VB ?