Website Review and Suggestions

**collegec** · 06-05-2007, 10:12 PM

I just launched the site www.collegecolosseum.com I was just wondering if I could have everyone's overall opinion. Also, I launched the site about a week ago, but I have yet to have any users register. Any suggestions?

**vangogh** · 06-06-2007, 12:24 AM

The site looks fine overall. It's not the most beautiful of sites, but it's fine. The text on the home page is a little hard for me to read, particularly the links toward the bottom. Making them bigger would help.

With a forum it's somewhat of a catch22, but people are more likely to register at a forum where there are already a lot of members. Post yourself, get every friend you know to post. Try to make the forum as active as you can without relying on people you don't know to join. Post at other forums and add your link in your signature.

If the forum is the main thing you want to promote why not make it the home page? Get people to it right away. If you don't want it to be the home page I'd call the link in the main navigation 'forum' instead of 'interact.' I know what a forum is and what to expect when clicking on a link called forum. Interact, while descriptive makes me think what I might find. Don't make me think.

**collegec** · 06-06-2007, 11:21 AM

Thanks very much for the insight.

I wanted to keep the layout of the website simple because I figure when people see too much going on they are more likely to click away. I will go ahead and change the interact link to "forum". The forum is going to be the main focus of the site, but once we get users we'd also like for them to start writing articles, submitting photos, etc. That was the reason for not setting the forum as the main page.

Any other suggestions for growing the community?

So far we've set up a myspace page, submitted to all search engines (only showing on google so far), and have been submitting on every open directory we can find.

**collegec** · 06-06-2007, 10:20 PM

sorry i initially posted this in the wrong forum. considering im a new user it wouldn't let me post in the review forum. Any other suggestions?

**vangogh** · 06-06-2007, 11:57 PM

That makes sense Ian about not making the forum the home page. Just so you know in the future you don't need to submit your site to search engines. Google probably found it through a link back to the site and not because of the submission. There's nothing wrong with submitting, but it doesn't really help.

In the future when you want to get something indexed just work on getting links pointing back to the site. It's actually one of the good uses of forum signatures. Because forums are frequently updated if you post on one that's reasonably popular it should get spidered soon enough and your signature link will get picked up. The more popular the forum and the more you post the quicker it's likely to happen.

I think growing the community will take some time. Like I said people generally want to join active forums so the trick is making the forum look active.

One thing to consider is you have a lot and I mean a lot of sub-forums. That's going to make the forum look more empty. You might want to reconsider giving each school it's own section at first. You could simply list the state or even a region of the country so there would be less forums.

For example if I counted right you have 28 schools for the state of Alabama. You could leave the forum as Alabama and not list the schools. Make everyone name their school when joining and as the Alabama forum starts to grow you can separate out some of the schools that have attracted a lot of members.

If two people started posting in each school as you have it now each section would still look empty, but if instead you had 56 people posting in one forum for all Alabama schools it would look more active. Then later when you discover that say Faulkner University and Auburn University seem to have a lot of members you break them out and give each their own forum.

Also having all the schools listed separately is causing the page to take a long time to load. Some people who want to join might not want to wait for the page to load and end up leaving instead.

**jv16** · 06-07-2007, 04:03 AM

I agree with Steven, the site looks pretty ok. I don't quite like the background and the header image though, they both look too cheap to me. Could be just my taste, though.

I also don't quite like the color scheme, blue and yellow doesn't work very well together in my opinion.

You should think about dividing your main copy to chapters, now there's just a one long paragraph. The light blue link color on a white background makes the links rather difficult to read, especially since you use so small font size for them.

**collegec** · 06-07-2007, 10:54 PM

Thanks for the detailed response. I appreciate the time you took to do so.

Initially I was going to set the forums up as you described. Do it by state, and then add the subforums as people joined, because as you stated it would give the impression it was more popular. The reason I didn't is because I did a search and saw there were a few college forums that were doing just that. It seemed like they were only catering to the large state universities. I wanted to set my site apart from them.

My thought process was to take the time and pre-set the subforum for each school. In a sense I'm trying to cater to the smaller schools (2000 or less) that may get over looked.

I know for me personally, I go to a small school. I don't want to go to a website that only has forums for large universities (40,000+) and then have to ask to have a forum set up, however if I were to go to the site and see the forum was already set up ready to use, I would be more inclined to use it. Of course this was just my personal opinion and my reason for setting it up as I did.

**sheezes2** · 06-08-2007, 08:04 AM

as said, the background is really annoying to the eyes. I think the bold text is used on the wrong places as well. the logo is half clip art and half web2.0 style, choose one style and stick to it :\

**collegec** · 06-08-2007, 10:51 AM

any reccomendations on a different background to go with?

**jmedrano2187** · 06-08-2007, 04:08 PM

great perfect public service

**Ben_David** · 06-08-2007, 05:48 PM

sorry man, dont like it at all

**highanddry** · 06-08-2007, 09:40 PM

The background is visually unappealing. Also.. yes your forums make you stand apart from others.. but not in a good way. That many empty forums looks bad, elongates the page too much and is generally distracting.

**collegec** · 06-18-2007, 12:52 PM

Does anyone have any thoughts on how I can improve the background?