RouterForums.com - Critique & advice please

Hello,

I'm very new to the forum administration "game", RouterForums.com is pretty much my first forum. I'm looking for some constructive criticism and any advice you can give me.

http://www.routerforums.com

Thanks

Your forum looks good.

Remember:
[HOW-TO] Remove "Powered by vBulletin" from Your Page Titles

How would your links look if they were in traditional blue? Might pop a little more.

I think 3 -yes, 3- messages to get me to try to register screams "desperate".

pop up thing...
between the ads...
and the welcome headers

i'd kill 2 of them.

Thank you both for your great advice, I'm going to do my best to fix those. Also, can I legally remove the "vBulletin" from the title of the page, even if I don't "own" vBulletin? Or am I required to purchase it.

Nice skin

When I read the URL I thought your site is about Network Routers

I'd highly suggest changing your welcome headers from text, to an image.

This can be accomplished quite easily with software like frontpage or dreamweaver, and will make it so it's not one of the first things spiders see and index, thereby greatly increasing your keyword relevance to the content

After searching for my site on a place like lycos, I realized our welcome headers were being indexed as the pages content either entirely or partially on every 'description' line.. so I changed it to an image.

Functionality is still the same, however we no longer have to worry about those problems.

Originally Posted by libertylounge

I'd highly suggest changing your welcome headers from text, to an image.

This can be accomplished quite easily with software like frontpage or dreamweaver, and will make it so it's not one of the first things spiders see and index, thereby greatly increasing your keyword relevance to the content

After searching for my site on a place like lycos, I realized our welcome headers were being indexed as the pages content either entirely or partially on every 'description' line.. so I changed it to an image.

Functionality is still the same, however we no longer have to worry about those problems.

Any tips on making links in an image? Not sure I have ever had to do that.

Thanks.

you need to use either an image map, or if you are using a fixed-width layout, you can use absolute positioned divs.

Imagemap Help Page -- Client-side Imagemaps
CSS positioning - Absolute positions

Essentially you just need to make the image in whatever image software you use (preferably something that can make clear background .gif's so it works on every style you have)

Use a fixed width, maybe 800 or a little less, and have it say what you want it to say for your welcome header message.

Then, load up a new HTML page in Dreamweaver, insert the image, and when you click on it, you should see options down at the bottom to select

Use the rectangle (or whatever you prefer I guess) to highlight a section of the image, put in your alt tags, the URL of place you want the part of that image to link to, etc.. and do the same for any other parts.

I only changed my "Guest Message" to an image because the bots will never see any of the others, but my members will.

Here's an example of my code for it:

Code:

<center>

<img src="http://www.libertylounge.net/status/political-forums-welcome.gif" width="800" height="200" border="0" usemap="#Map" alt="Liberty Lounge Political Forums - Welcome" />
<map name="Map" id="Map"><area shape="rect" coords="23,96,193,116" href="http://www.libertylounge.net/forums/register.php" alt="Register today!" />
<area shape="rect" coords="504,136,587,160" href="http://www.libertylounge.net/forums/sendmessage.php" alt="Contact us!" />
</map>

</center>

You can see it on The Liberty Lounge Political Forums

Great tips, thank you very much.