Hiya everyone! Being a professional web designer and developer I thought I'd offer my 2c on EntropiaPlanets.com, as I really want this site to do well. Firstly, being a new, small site, there should only be a TINY number of forums. I know everything needs a section but don't add them till they are requested or obviously needed. This might make some sections broader, but they become full of threads and discussions can actually take place. Having all these empty forums to scroll through scares people away! Secondly, decide on a final width. Sitting back from my monitor, i can count 3 different widths of the site (the header, the container for vbulletin, and the adverts. This is a psychological thing, and web studies have shown uncomfortable sites have up to 85% sorter browse times. Also, sort permissions so unregistered members cannot view profiles and the memberlist. Having it default how it is allows spambots to get anyones info, so security risk here. Less ads! Google only pays the publisher once when someone clicks an ad on that page load. So having 2-3 ads spamming up the pages will only pay as much as one ad. Hope this has been useful and I look forward to seeing this place grow!
I disagree with this one. A very good way for this forum to grow is to attract audiences for planet partners (the new players who have no affiliations as yet to any forum). Your not going to do that with not having a section for that planet partner. Separate metatags/adverts can they be made for each section of the forum i.e. if someone searches planet cyrene this page should be top or near the top of the list. Not going to happen if such a section does not exist. A better approach would be to populate those areas with useful content. Mostly agree with these.
The problem with the new planets is nothing much is available yet. Hence we kept the number of sub forums below them to 1 for the time being. As it seems, most items etc will be the same across from the different planets, so maybe we will just move items and skills etc into the general universe section instead. Let's wait and see how it unfolds, though. We tried ensuring the sub forums will give value, but sometimes we find that it makes a bit more sense with some additional shuffling, and ensuring we can cater to future expectations. This is mostly a trial and error thing, but we hope that things will settle in the end. I agree on the comment regarding empty forums, though. Regarding the width, initially we had a fixed width, but ended up changing that after some comments. I'll test a bit and try and get things looking better, though. On my own screen at home, things look consistent, but here at work, they do not. I'll see what I can do. As for the permissions, thanks for bringing that to my attention. Things should have been set up the way you mentioned. Maybe something somewhere did not follow through. It should have been addressed now, and guests no longer can see member info. Lastly, the google adds, the way we set it up now is the minimal possible way to get Google ads served within the standard forum software. The only place they are served is right below the header, and above the footer. The only exception to this is the frontpage side banner. If I were to change this, I'd have to hack the way they work, and considering a new forum software version will be released soon, I'll wait for that, and see if the new version gives more control than this version.
I've just changed things a bit, so now all of the top stuff should be alligned. I also tested this on my work PC, and there, too, things look a lot more synchronised now. To add to the new width, I also increased the sizes of the banners, though I'm not sure they look better now. Comments, please?
less ads? to be honest i hadnt even noticed the google ads on here till i just read this thread. somthing to look into along this vein is a merchandising account with something forum users will be happy to use through your link. A site i frequent has a single prominant Amazon link using their referer code, and i always use that link to go to amazon for purchases. they have amassed a 1.5k in two years through that, ad words and a couple of other affiliates. more tricky with multinational audience, but im sure theres somthing common.
Thanks :) Amazon links is something we will be using in our game review section soon :) I figured I'd hook up some prominent keywords to individual products, but the method you described also sounds useful. Care to PM me the link, so I can have a peek at how they do things there? (Oh, and check your rep, too, while you're at it ;))
I will have to agree with the OP on that there are too many forums. I don't see the point in having subforums for everything.. For example, Black whole could be without subforums... And does there really need to be a Flora forum?! How many posts could possibly be made there? Or maybe it's just me. I have the same problem with EF.
I could agree with the too many main forums. I believe the amount of subforums is ok though. It makes it easier to organize and have an overview where to find what. We can always look at it again, but we very recently did, where I actually moved some head forums in under other head forums as sub forums (because then it doesn't fill that much on the site and it could easily fit under another forum ;)
Another nice improvement. To reduce the amount of subforum you could create on mainforum for planets in development with only a general section for each and give each a main section when it goes online.
for size... maybe adjust table sizes to be a % instead of a fixed width... that way it's based on the browser size... if people open it wide, good, if not, who cares, it's a % of whatever the browser is.
If it stretches too far the readability suffers, and the EP banner in the header doesn't allow it to shrink below the size it has now - imo, there is no point in having a liquid layout when the min width is somewhere around 970 pixels anyway... and even with a lower min width you'd gain nothing: Posted pics would have to be downsized to fit into the min post width which would in turn look totally ridiculous on a screen that stretches it to >1000 pixels.
