Would like a critique and any advice :)

The site: The Liberty Lounge Political Forums

We just started about a week ago, so keep that in mind with the number of forums, etc.

I look forward to seeing your comments!

Your site is beautiful, easy to navigate, interesting topics, and updated. It is 'alive'!
I love the layout and the colors are perfect. It is fresh and fun. You kept in mind usability, organization, professionality, and your customer's needs in mind. And you did this from the ground up taking into consideration details that will help you to a smoother sailing.
**Keep creativity focused in your topic. **
As a business owner or community leader, everything you do, do it for something that is beyond just tangible results. Your passion can leave a legacy that can affect thousands of others, and this will make your work (site) significant.

Wishing you great success!

very nice site

Thank you both for the kind words. We have worked hard to make it a usable site that is appealing to a broad range of people.

The goal we have now is to expand our userbase and I am confident that vbSEO is going to play a large part in our success. Is there anything you see that believe could be improved?

One of the criticisms we've had is from a web design standpoint, the fonts are too large. But I think readability should trump design on a forum

LibertyLounge:

Your welcome message appears at the top of every page and will impact keyword relevancy.

Welcome to the The Liberty Lounge Political Forums! We are a community of people interested discussing and debating all aspects of politics, economics, current events, and social issues! Our members come from every end of the political spectrum, and enjoy discussing their views on a wide range of topics.

You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to our forums. By registering a free account, you will be able to participate in a large number of active threads, post topics about anything that interests you, and much more!

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us and we'll help get you started. We look forward to seeing you on the forums!

You might remove entirely or minimize the following:

You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to our forums. By registering a free account, you will be able to participate in a large number of active threads, post topics about anything that interests you, and much more!

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us and we'll help get you started. We look forward to seeing you on the forums!

It would be nice if you could move this welcome block under the breadcrumb block so that the title's of the page appear more prominently (first text).

How much could that possibly hurt us in rankings?

We have to maintain a balance between ranking well on search engines and translating those clicks into registrations. I believe many sites have had great success with the welcome headers hack in terms of registration rates, and I would prefer not to get rid of them.

If we remove the thing to kinda nudge 'em into registering, wouldn't it kind of defeat the purpose of the hack?

I'll look into moving it.

Alright. I added it to the navbar template above "quickregister", but below the breadcrumb.

Does that look better? And do you really think I should remove the register stuff?

It can definitely impact your keyword relevancy on each page, skewing it from the actual relevant content (defined as the title and post content). However, you're right - you can't simple ignore other marketing aspects such as conversion.

I would suggesting trying to reduce the text as much as possible, while still maintaining your 'call to action' or promotional text. Can you rewrite it and cut out any unnecessary words.

Play with positioning if you can. Even if the same text is used, I feel that under the breadcrumbs would be better positioning.

Also - I personally advocate converting the welcome message to an image so that the marketing message is maintained without impacting keyword relevancy of top-of-page text whatsoever.

That'd require some significant editing to the way welcome headers works though, I think? And I'd have to have different images for each of the templates we offer our users.

Do you have a tutorial for how to go about this? It's definitely something I would consider.

I'll work on re-writing it, and I moved it to underneath the breadcrumb. Does that look ok now? I feel like there is too large of a space between the breadcrumb and $welcome headers.. trying to figure out how to remedy that.

There are probably just some extra <br/> tags in there somewhere that you can remove to tighten it up.

Yeah, looking for them now.

Another problem the image presents is that we don't use a fixed width template. It'd have to be small enough width wise to work on every monitor and not skew the template. :/

Yes, using the image can present some layout stumbling blocks.

I don't see any other stray linebreaks, I guess that looks alright for now.

I don't mind fiddling with the layout, but I'd like to see how the welcome_headers template code for anyone who's successfully converted it to an image so that I can play around with it.

My main worry is that it would look strange to anyone with a larger resolution monitor if we kept it within bounds for 800x600.

very nice looking site

I like the move of the welcome header to under the breadcrumbs. Looks good.

If image vs. text is problematic, just shortening the text some will help a bit. Consider changing:

Welcome to the The Liberty Lounge Political Forums! We are a community of people interested discussing and debating all aspects of politics, economics, current events, and social issues! Our members come from every end of the political spectrum, and enjoy discussing their views on a wide range of topics.

You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to our forums. By registering a free account, you will be able to participate in a large number of active threads, post topics about anything that interests you, and much more!

If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us and we'll help get you started. We look forward to seeing you on the forums!

to:

Liberty Lounge Political Forums welcomes debate and discussion of politics, economics, current events, and social issues. Diversity of political viewpoints is supported and encouraged.

To contribute to or start your own discussion, please complete our political forums registration. Contact us if you require help getting started.

Also, consider linking the words in green to sub-forums or important threads that you want to promote. Change the keywords to something more specific (targeted) if you wish as long as it still reads normally.