Education in the Philippines Forum

Hi all.

I'd like to request for comments on a forum on Philippine education I am running at http://eduphil.org/

Particularly, I would like comments regarding the following aspects:
(1) loading time
(2) theme (design)
(3) first-time-user-friendliness (i.e. does the website makes sense right away to someone who just stumbled upon it?)
(4) organization, i.e. how the categories and subforums are organized (I understand most may not be interested about Philippine education, but any feedback would be appreciated)

Thank you very much in advance.

 

Loading time is great; there are no issues for me there.

The theme is okay. It's gentle on the eyes and isn't ugly. But I think it's very close to the default MyBB skin. Not really a bad thing, but it makes the forum seem less unique.
Perhaps something more interesting and different would be better.

As a first-time visitor, I was a bit overwhelmed at first. You have about 25 forums (not counting sub-forums) as well as a ton of links at the top. At first I thought the links were advertisements, but then I realized they were to various places on your site.
The links to various forums (Teaching Jobs, How to Pass the LET, etc.) are really unnecessary. People will find them as they scroll down the index; there's no need to have them at the top.
The "We Support" links should perhaps be moved to the footer. While they're in the header, they immediately divert visitors' attention to other websites. I just landed on your site and am immediately being presented with links that take me away from your site. That's not something we want, now is it?

My biggest concern is the amount of forums you have. As I said before, you have 25 top-level forums and many of them have very few posts in them. You should really consider combining some forums into a single forum (or one forum with sub-forums).
For example, the DepEd Issuances category: all four of its forums have less than 50 posts. Two of them have none. You should combine all of these into one forum; or change the "DepEd Issuances" category into a forum with the four forums becoming sub-forums.
The School Reviews and Parents Discussion could be combined into just "Parents' Corner" or something.
There are a few other instances where you can combine unpopular forums. It's very unappealing to visitors to see a ton of forums, half of which are empty or rarely used. I would much rather see 10 greatly-active forums.
The general key is keep it small, then grow as the activity increases. That's one of the biggest mistakes that forum owners make.

Let me know if you have any questions about anything I've reviewed.

 

Wow, thanks Nick! Perhaps the feeling of being "overwhelmed" is the reason I only have about 3-4 signups everyday, even if I have about 200 uniques. I'm considering putting up only three categories in the index page: Marketplace, General Forums, and Specialized Forums. Then I will move everything outside the Marketplace and General Forums to the Specialized Forums. What do you think?

 

I just checked out your site and it looks much less cluttered and overwhelming than before. Great work!

Next you should consider a new skin/style and perhaps upgrading to a paid forum script such as vBulletin.

 

Re skin/style: I will have to stick to free themes for now. I'm running low on the budget.

Same thing with migrating to vBulletin. I find vBulletin the best forum software to post, and most probably my members too, but it's way out of my league (in terms of $$$) as of now.

 

Looks good. Loads very well, maybe the theme would not look so default if you shrink it a bit and put a nice background to it.
The light color forums IMHO look best at about 80% screen size.

There are codes for that and if you get into a mybb support forum which there are so so many you can toy around with the code until you get the right look.

I think the color is good for a Edu theme forum. Nothing flashy and not default. IMO adjusting the screen display size will make a great improve on the appeal and will attract many more sign ups.

You are correct and you do have much traffic going into the domain. Now it is up to you to lure them into signing up.

Maybe the mybb hack for guest messeges would work without restricting too much of the forum.

 

Thanks Crank!