Full review for AH Forum

Maki1 at 19h00

Sep

2010

Name of the Forum: Advertise Highway
Address: http://www.advertisehighway.com/
Area's you wish the reviewer to review: I would like a full review by KingOfSports, a test account has been sent to KOS, by pm.

Thank you,
-Maki

1 KingOfSports, on 05/09/2010 at 16h29

Tagged.

2 Maki1, on 05/09/2010 at 17h46

Thank you

3 KingOfSports, on 07/09/2010 at 16h19

Advertise Highway

First Impressions - Satisfactory

My first impressions were that the forum looks very organized and provides a lot of services. However, after I looked through the forum completely, it seems to copy a lot of organization and ideas from ForuMansion which I don't approve of. A couple things that I don't like are that your banner is on the small side and that you use both images and links for your navigation bar. I prefer either images or links, not both.

I was very surprised to see that you have long, descriptive blocks of texts for your forum descriptions which I like a lot. Most forum are very inconsistent when it comes to those.

The organization of the forums is very good for the most part. The only thing I would change is the Forum Reviews. I would move it to the Promotion and Services category. Other than that, the rest of the forums look good where they are!

Graphics & Layout - Good

I've already stated my opinion a little bit on this topic. I think your banner is too small. It should be a little bit taller and I think it would be cool if you added more shadow to the text. Some of the banners in the banner jumble don't seem to have the highest quality. That might be because the size had to change or something, but they look a bit odd. However, that is a pretty cool feature.

As I said earlier with the navigation bar, I recommend not using images and links. Pick 1 or the other. For promotion forums I think it would be better if you had text buttons. Then add a little CSS hover effect to them to make them look cool.

The forum favicon is decent. It's a bit hard to read from different angles because of the text color. i would try to make the AH a little darker blue so that it stands out more from the light blue/white background.

For the most part you topic icons are good. However, some are different sizes. I saw some that are 48x48, some that are 40x40 and some that were 35x35. Just try to make them all the same size. Your forum will look a lot better than way. It will also look more consistent if everything is the same size.

The No New Posts/New Posts/Closed icons look fine. They aren't too special, but they aren't that plain either. Maybe you could add a gloss/glow effect to the text to make it stand out a bit more. That's just a suggestion for you to try out.

Forum Activity - Good

Our users have posted a total of 11160 messages
We have 220 registered users

That comes out to about 51 posts per user which is on the up side. This means that you are having some problems attracting members, but the members that you do have are active and post often to keep your forum up and running. For a promotion forum, this number would normally be a little higher, but that will come when you get more members.

Staff & Usergroups - Satisfactory

You have 7 groups for 220 members. 2 admins for 220 members is fine as long as you don't have too many other staff members. You only have 1 moderator, so thats a plus. 2 designers is a good amount. Since you have no reviewers, I would hide the review group until you get a couple reviewers. I'm not sure what the community team is, but it has several members so it must be an active group of people.

A suggestion I have for your forum is instead of having a review, package, and designer group, just make 1 group called Service Team or something like that and give them different ranks instead. (Review rank, designer rank, package rank, etc.)

Originality & Unique Quality - Needs Improvement

There are hundreds of thousands of advertising forums/websites in the world. This one doesn't seem very different from the rest of them. I really don't see anything that makes this one stand out from the rest. You use the default images on your navigation bar, the organization looks like a copy of ForuMansion, and the services you provide are found on almost every forum. You need something that most other promotion sites don't have. However that may be a little hard to find.