New Home Owners And Snagging Forum

[Topman]

My New Home Owners and Snagging Forum at forum.brand-newhomes.co.uk/index.php was started in 2011 as an addition to the main website www.brand-newhomes.co.uk to enable UK new home buyers to ask for advice and share their new home buying experiences.   

There are currently 1918 posts, in 775 topics by 142 members. The forum used to get around 130,000 page views a month but this has dipped since the upgrade and the move to a sub domain.
There are no restrictions on membership except non-posters and link spammers who will have their accounts deleted.
I have included a Grumpy Corner,Lounge and even Jokes catagories to widen the appeal.

Regular members will know that I have recently upgraded to SMF 2.0.10 and I have had a few problems and issues to say the least.  I am currently working through checking all the posts after setting to uft8 added these  and other symbols!

I have now finished my Theme tweaks to the index.css and theme image files and I am quite proud what I have achieved.
The only thing left to do would be a rotating banner image the Logo Rotator Mod doesn't seem to work with 2.0.10!

Whilst the scheme may not be to everyone's tastes, I would be interested in your views and opinions.

[Topman]

Just wondering when this is likely to be "approved" and if anyone would like to review my forum?

[Irisado]

The Team has been discussing this, and a decision is pending .

Edit: Topic approved.

[Topman]

I would like to take this opportunity to thank several dedicated and knowledgeable members on this forum who have helped me with both the upgrade, re design and addition of new Mods.

My forum upgrade to 2.0.10 and the re design is complete.... Including the rotating banner!
Open to your scrutiny, please be gentle!

[Deaks]

Should make background single colour to keep better flat look

[Topman]

Thank you for your feedback.

To be honest, I quite like the top background that is standard default.
What I would have liked to do is blend it is as on this forum but i couldnt get it to work.

[Austin Scott]

Hi Topman,
The forum looks nice. But the separator under the header does not make any sense. It's better to remove it.

[jeremymarcus]

Nice Forum!  I did notice though, it took a little longer than usual to load.  I would recommend trying to speed things up a little bit and maybe do an analysis on what can make the site more SEO friendly. There are a few tools out there that I like.   Google "Site Analyzer" and your page gets a score on there of of 57% and shows some simple changes / improvements you can make to make the forum more recognizable to search engines.

Thanks,
Jeremy Marcus

[Topman]

Thanks for that Jeremy, I am always open to SEO suggestions.

[swifix]

Nice website and also a nice idea because i aint seen any home owner forums.. this will get a lot of members!

[snowy_1971]

Looks good. Will be interesting reading some of the posts as my parents are just about to instruct someone to do a new build.

[Topman]

Nice website and also a nice idea because i aint seen any home owner forums.. this will get a lot of members!

You would think so wouldn't you, but Twitter and Facebook are the new Forums I think.

[ayeweb]

the header image is so big and slow to load it.

[lagaiphone]

The forum looks nice.