Hi, this is my new college help forum, http://www.acollegehand.com , id appreciate if you gave some feedback

needmoney - I like the site topic. It's a niche that is severely underserved if you approach it correctly. I think that you can become quite popular if you market correctly.

That being said, you need to breathe some life into that forum. There are too few posts for me to even consider actually posting there with a question that I need answered. You could hold a contest or something like that in order to generate some activity on the forum.

I'd say hold off on the contest until you get a solid readership. It would be embarrassing to have a contest with no participants because there are just too few users.

But start promoting -- talk to college bloggers, visit other college forums (and be careful when asking them to help contribute to your forum). Add valuable content and posts and keep at it.

Like a blog, you need to nurture a forum. That means keeping it updated all the time, even if the visitors don't come immediately. My blog didn't take off for several months after I first started.

I find the site's topic interesting and i like its design too. I suggest to add more topics to make it more interactive.

Hey needmoney,

Just informing you your website seems to be down, though your possibly updating it and i just have awful timing. Lol

Best Regards,

Ok, thanks for your input. http://www.acollegehand.com , hows it look now? Im getting a new, custom template tomorow

I've seen this template before and honestly I doubt if you made it yourself, but stealing themes and templates is one of the first steps of learning how to program and design websites. The images are all saved in gif or jpg which I would personally change to PNG. And what people in here missed, you have made a terible meta tag mistake:

<meta name="keywords" content="college, acollegehand, college help, college admissions, college application, SAT help, ACT help, where to apply, college visits, college interviews, schools, universities"

You will have to end this keywords meta tag with

<meta name="keywords" content="college, acollegehand, college help, college admissions, college application, SAT help, ACT help, where to apply, college visits, college interviews, schools, universities"/>

I made you a little start package of your website images compressed in PNG with optipng (an ubuntu terminal compressor, one every designer should use). The size of the 6 images I found got reduced from: 45.4 kb to 36kb which is a difference.
www.mmoauction.dk/img/review.zip

You might also want to take a look at the W3C XHTML and CSS validator, compress the every used file (remove comments, white spaces and maybe use a little gzip_compress on some of the files).

Keep up the spirit and feel free to contact me if you need more help.

Best regards
Ulrik M.