I'm in the process of making a resource for bloggers and in the meantime I decided to launch the forum and start to grow the community while I finish developing the other aspects of the site.

I'm not concerned about the design, as the reason for the colors in the vB theme will match the rest of the site once it's up and I am having some custom icons made.

My main concern is the content and number of forums etc. I've been a part of forums for a while but this is the first community I have tried to launch.

My questions are:

1. Do I have too many forums?
2. Do the forums I have cover everything in general?
3. What am I missing?

from everything I've read, you don't want to have too many forums in the beginning as things will look dead.

Please take a look at my blog forum and tell me what you think.

Thanks.

too many forum? I thought you only have 1 forum showing on your thread.

Nope, there are 9 there.

I agree 100% with not having too many forums - but I don't think you do. In fact, I think you've got just the right amount and seem to have all bases covered. I like how you've sectioned the 5 blogging forums, they are all clearly defined different topics, without having anything lumped together in one category like some boards do.

However, the one thing that did jump out at me - and bear in mind this is a silly small detail, brought up only because I'm a mega-critical perfectionist - is the naming of the blogging category. You call it "Blogging Basics" and describe it as a section for new bloggers, but inside you have a basics forum together with some more specific areas, which dosen't fit to me.

Looks like it could be a nice community, I wish you best of luck!

EDIT: Oh, a further point I only noticed upon signing up - is there a particular reason you have account moderation turned on?

Thanks for that awesome reply Spizz. Exactly the kind of info I need. I should tweak the description for blogging basics; you're right.

As far as the account moderation; i turned it on tempoarily as I had some guy join and he tried to harass a few members. I have seen this guy at other forums to the same thing and he just seems to follow these people around so I didn't want him to do this when I was sleeping. I realize I won't be able to maintain this for long; but this dude is a real troll and I guess I feel like I owe it to the people that are good members to do what I can to make sure he doesn't do that.

Again.. thanks for the solid feedback.

I checked your forum and no, you don't have too many categories there, which is good.
By the way, you may want to hire a few forum posters to boost your forum so that it does not look too empty.

Well, it's only been live a week so I haven't considered paying for posters yet. For a week its got almost 800 posts which I didn't think was too bad.