Forum Suggestions? (Blues Brothers Central)

[bbcentral]

I've had a forum for almost 5 years on my Blues Brothers website:
Soul Food Cafe - Blues Brothers Central

I had around 1 year with my own hand-coded forum (PHP/MySQL), then a few years of phpBB2 before eventually switching to vBulletin.

I've only had vBSEO installed for a few months but I'm already seeing the benefits, it was worth every cent! (Yes, put me on record as a happy customer!)

A few weeks ago I redesigned my forum theme, it was becoming an absolute pain to upgrade to new versions of vB due to the template edits. So I created a new template from the default, did as much of the customization as I could using only CSS, and then modified only the templates I needed to.

The biggest change I've made was switching from an 800x600 based design to a 1024x768 design (both fixed), according to Google Analytics only 3% of my visitors over the last 6 months have had 800x600 resolutions.

I've also taken advantage of custom forum icons to try to give the forum a unique feel, and pictures should help people work out which forum to post in better.

So far I've only received positive feedback from my members regarding the new design, everyone's very happy with it.

Old:


New:

(Probably looks better as part of the design but you get the idea, meant to look like a window with reflections).

Most of my running costs are offset by Google Adsense and Amazon.com Associates, hence the banners integrated into the design. I'm still running at a semi-heavy loss, but the banners are what keep the site going, I came close to shutting down not long ago.

Most days I have only around 50-60 members logging into the forum, I sent out my first HTML newsletter last week and it spiked to 130, although it's now dropped back down again.

I'm in the process of rebuilding my main website:
Blues Brothers Central : The Internet's Largest Blues Brothers Fansite
So that should help bring more traffic, it will be much more integrated with the forum. For example a page about Dan Aykroyd will have a list of the last 5 posts in the Dan Aykroyd forum, etc.

If anyone feels like taking a quick look at my forum and letting me know if they have any comments or suggestions, I'd certainly appreciate any advice or constructive criticism

[Joe Ward]

• Your site looks great. Very vibrant color scheme, which gives it a feeling of activity.
• Do you make much income from the HostGator affiliate program? If not, you might consider removing it from the footer.
• Your forum header looks fantastic.
• I would fix your forum welcome message. At minimum you should write it with niche specific keywords and get rid of the FAQ link. You could also convert it to an image.
• Your sub-forum descriptions are quite generic. One that stands out as a really good one is the description for the "Dan Aykroyd" forum, which has some nice related keywords.
• Your footer archive links are fine, because you have only 36 of them. I recommend with forums that have larger #s of links to disable the feature.
• I think I would remove "Soul Food Cafe" from your forum display pages, for each sub-forum, and allow the TITLE part to focus on the sub-forum name alone. This is even more important on your thread pages since your long tail should be optimized for the thread title to bring optimum results.
• I would replace your showpost link with Permalink (see Permalink options in your vBSEO Control Panel, vbseocp.php). If you do so, please remember to disable "Include Showposts" in your vBSEO "Sitemap" settings (vB's /admincp/).

[bbcentral]

Thanks for your great reply Joe! It was extremely helpful

• Your site looks great. Very vibrant color scheme, which gives it a feeling of activity.

Thanks, I had fun making it, and the feedback has been very positive so far!

• Do you make much income from the HostGator affiliate program? If not, you might consider removing it from the footer.

No, I haven't made a cent from it in nearly 2 years. I've removed the whole row of text, they'll get a credit on my "About Us" page when I finish my new site.

• I would fix your forum welcome message. At minimum you should write it with niche specific keywords and get rid of the FAQ link. You could also convert it to an image.

Never thought of that! I've gone ahead and changed it to an image now, I'll probably tweak it later on but it will do for now. I don't think the previous message was creating many registrations, if this even gets a few more then thats a bonus.

• Your sub-forum descriptions are quite generic. One that stands out as a really good one is the description for the "Dan Aykroyd" forum, which has some nice related keywords.

I'll have to go back and change these at some stage soon, it's a good idea!

• I think I would remove "Soul Food Cafe" from your forum display pages, for each sub-forum, and allow the TITLE part to focus on the sub-forum name alone. This is even more important on your thread pages since your long tail should be optimized for the thread title to bring optimum results.

Done, removed it from the Show Forum, Show Thread and Member Info templates!

• I would replace your showpost link with Permalink (see Permalink options in your vBSEO Control Panel, vbseocp.php). If you do so, please remember to disable "Include Showposts" in your vBSEO "Sitemap" settings (vB's /admincp/).

All done, very good idea! I've also removed the showpost links from my sitemap generator and noticed a big drop in the size of my sitemap, another fantastic bonus! I'm now only submitting 2 files to Google each day rather than 6, and all the links actually count!

[bbcentral]

I've also just added a robots.txt to exclude my /forum/general-chat/ section from being spidered. It's all topics like "How's the weather?" and "Random thoughts", and games etc. Most of the useful stuff is posted elsewhere, so this should help a bit