Give you honest feedback -
Design is okay - bit too much gray which isn't too welcome looking and gives the page a moody kinda look which If I would admin the page would not like since I would like vibrant colors etc.
Also black font on dark grey background is horrible hard to read.
The overall layout:
You have too many boards, trust me on that one I have run very succesful and large boards for a long time with 1 - 2 very large webpages so I know what I am talking about, a subboard with
100 posts is not concidered busy enough to persvuade new members to sign up.
The absolute noob mistake all noob forum administrators make is to have a sub board for everything they can think of, thinking if new members see that they have so much to choose from it will
sure look professional and busy and good.
The referse is the opposite, most new members check out the first two three boards and when they see that you have 100 or a little more posts in them well guess what, they simply not going to sign up.
What you need is around 5 subboards, that means they fit on most user screens without scrolling.
I mean you dont need an extra sub board that says: How to post a new topic or how to registers (thats crazy)- create a sticky New Members how to thread and put all the info there.
Same with welcome forums, unless you have a very busy board or at least some people join a day you don't need a welcome forum, create a welcome thread instead and sticky it.
Pack all the info in there so the boards look busy and are full with info - remember users are lazy.
If you do it right and get a little uplift and get the board off the ground you need to plug away and keep plugging, to make forums real busy and to continue to keep them busy is massive amount of work and crazy hard.
Check out one of my boards for my webpage apacheclips.com -> board ->
http://www.apacheclips.com/boards I started the page somewhat 3 years ago and after 1 year added a board to the
whole setup but each subboard was created way after it only when a large amounnt of members asked for it.
Any questions I be happy to share what I have learned
