I'm trying to make my site look the best I can and get efficient functionality for my members as well. I would appreciate some of you experienced techy-types taking a look at my Midwest Predator site and giving me some ideas if you don't mind.

I'm sure there are things I could do to improve it still but I have pretty well maxed out my web-building potential for now!

Any input, help or suggestions are appreciated:

Midwest Predator

Hi JRB

I'm sure other will have may great ideas to add. I'll start things off with a few qucik points to keep in mind.

1) Set a home to where home wants to be. Where is the 'top' level of your community? For sure http://midwestpredator.groupee.net needs to have an .htaccess file to repoint the domain to your community.

Is the top of your community the portal page? If so be sure to keep that page fresh with new content, announcemenst and pointers to the active places. Think of it as the 10 sec test for a visitor. Are there 3-5 things that will spark interest? Tweak your content island to show the most interesting posts. Consider some photos in that 'welcome' section.

Not using the portal? Turn it off and make the start for the community the forums summary page.

2) Apply the "above the fold" rule ruthlessly.

No new community ever gets the number and names of forums right the first time. Most communities have too many, in fact.

On a regular screen look at you summary page. Is it filled with active topics from the last few days max? If not, consolidate forums.

Scroll down one page. Do the same test. Remember that you are now "below the fold" and you have already lost more than half the visitors to the summary page. people tend to read AND navigate above the fold so design accordingly.

The same test can be applied to each forum page. Are the topics 'above the fold' from the last week? If not consolidate forums. A sure sign of inactivity is days or weeks between posts.

3) Simplify. Most web pages try to squeeze in too much info. You can make this mistake with Groupee but fortunately it's easy to correct.

Stats are invisible to most people and clutter the page. Consider using only Posts OR Views, not both columns. Ditto Topics OR replies but not both. Use the 'hot topic' icon to show what's really busy. Some sites turn off these stats entirely for a cleaner layout.

Tweak the last post column width and the author column width. You want the subject column and the last post column to have prominence.

Rating? Do you use it? Turn off the column and even the feature if it's not used in 2/3s of your topics in the forum list. Some forums shouldn't use it at all (e.g. a newbie intro forum)

Check these out and let us know what you think.

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