Board Name: Music-Talk.org Forums
Board URL: http://forums.music-talk.org/
Board Description: A music forum with areas for discussion music artists, genres, instruments, music theory, as well as user-submitted content like lyrics, poetry, recordings, tablature, articles, and gear and CD reviews in conjunction with a website.
Specific things you would like a comment on (optional): Nothing in particular, any comments or suggestions are more than welcome. :)

Strengths

• Good solid theme, complete with all the buttons and a matching logo.
• Special forums have themes that go along with the forum title, creative :)
• Navigation under the banner, blends well.
• Favicon :)
• A site that goes along with your forum, and shares the same theme.
• Neat points board. Good encouragement for members to check and increase their rankings.
• Many other cool interesting pages as well.

Weaknesses

• Many parts of the theme appear to be from the standard theme and out of place, such as the user links drop down boxes.
• Low relative activity. Of the 311 currently registered members (not counting deleted accounts, which would make it 717), only 25 have been on at all this month (that's 8%). Only 175 have even been on this year (56%).

Recommendations

• The main site has a spot to log in, but still asks you to log in even if you already are. This could be made more impressive perhaps if you either 1: Have the index of the board check/write a cookie containing your username, and have the main page read the same cookie and write the contents to know who you are (when you log out, you'de be at the index again and it would rewrite it for you as a guest; or 2: use ajax or a frame to check if you are logged in on the board (a slower method, but simpler).
• Many find having all your forums displayed to guests as a bad thing. In your case, it appears to be fine, but perhaps just have the guest box list the forums that only members can see.
• Try to get some of your old members back. Send out some board emails telling them what they've been missing.
• Chatroom appears completely dead. It's not even registered. Considering the size of your active member base, maybe your should try going with a shoutbox instead.

Thanks a lot for your recommendations! We're definitely working on the low activity, since we've been around for two years but I've only started advertising in the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, our first mass e-mail after our conversion to ZB didn't bring in any old members. :(

I'd love to enact your first recommendation, syncing up the site and the forums to check for when a user's logged in, but unfortunately I'm not a very good coder (what you said sounds like something that would need PHP, no? I only have a very basic knowledge of the language). Do you perhaps know of a tutorial somewhere that would teach me how to write a script to do one of the two things you suggested in that vein?

What kind of email did you send out? Show me a copy.

I just realized the different subdomains with the site and the board. This pretty much rules out cookies, but lets us take the simpler path (though a little slower). It won't require php (though it would help) and I assume you probably don't know ajax, but do you know how to use javascript to get information out of an iframe? If not, I can add a to-do list and work on it for you. It would make a nice code to release for other sites anyways.

Here's the e-mail:

We're going to send out another in a couple of days to notify them of upcoming activities for our 2-year anniversary, such as a couple contests we're starting. Hopefully that will draw them in.

Unfortunately the only Javascript I know is jQuery, which only works on the forums. If you could help me with that, I would greatly appreciate it. :)

Alright, thats a good email. Hope you get some more people back.

I don't use jQuery because I dislike having to learn libraries, plus you only end up using a small piece of it, and the rest is just extra stuff to be loaded. Besides, I prefer to code clean and have absolute control over what I'm doing (same reason I don't use wysiwyg website makers; notepad for me lol.

Anyways, I'll see what I can do :)

Thanks a lot. I know what you mean about the WYSIWYG things like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, I never understood why people used those. I don't trust them to spit out code, so I just write it myself. I just don't know enough about Javascript to do that though, and jQuery is really easy to get the hang of, so it's easy to use that for little changes around the forums, especially because it comes preloaded with Zetaboards.