How is your forum useful to me or others?
@HAWK and others describe the issues very well. Know your community and know your value proposition.
On your site, both issues are unclear and that is not helped by your content. After visiting your website I still have no idea how your website will help me.
Your About page says “A lounge for webmasters!” and your domain name clearly evokes a cafe-style. But your forum is not very relaxed with lots of earnest questions and mundane information.
- You use a brand which has its fair share of controversy - I never use Starbucks - and you leave yourself open to legal problems with that organisation.
- A lounge evokes relaxation: the noun means “a public room in a hotel, theatre, or club in which to sit and relax”; and the verb means to “lie, sit, or stand in a relaxed or lazy way.” Yet your content is not at all relaxing or social.
- It is a bit of a problem that “webmasters” is a Google product.
So I would include other categories of user: website owner, web architects, web developers, web administrators, website authors, etc. For example:
EWebdiscussion.com is a board where every one specially Web Masters , SEO Gurus, Programmers , Graphic designers and developers and other IT professionals are welcome to share their knowledge and thoughts …
And I would specify some things to search for that aren’t just in your category names.
> is a Webmaster discussion forum is a board to discuss issues like SEO, Marketing, Hosting, Programming, PHP, Wordpress, …
Seeding is not working
You have seeded the forum with conversations but they are unsettling to read because the personalities are uncannily similar. My mind will subconsciously pick up that the similarities are not normal. Then I end up disliking the site because I can feel that I am being tricked or conned.
- They appear as the same voice even though you are using three accounts. I’m not saying that you need to eliminate all grammatical errors. Instead I’m saying that having three users making the same sort of errors means that they all sound like the same person.
- Grammatical errors. You can use a grammar checker like the one in Microsoft Word to give you some ideas about what may be wrong.
- Spelling mistakes. Using a spell check mean that you eliminate mistakes that can distract from what you are trying to say.
Content deficiencies
- You don’t have enough specialist sub-categories to interest me.
- Your posts focus on explaining things but you hinder understanding by spreading the information across different replies. These sort of topics should be should be in How-To / FAQ / Glossary topics or in a blog. An example is if I were looking for “The best way to host a website in mainland China” then I would be looking for an authoritative article that made comparisons easy. I would not be looking for a conversation where the key differences are spread over many replies.
- It is OK to have the conversation but a blog post with a comparison table would be most useful.
- Likewise, it helps people to see diagrams and maps. Because China is so large, I would like to know about geographical server locations, peering arrangements, the Great Wall, transit into and out of China. I searched on peering in China and took the first two links (Peering and the Chinese Internet - Dispatches by John P. Gamboa and VPNs & Internet in China: Everything you need to know). The usefulness of both articles is enhanced, a lot and a little, because of their diagrams.
- If you used FAQS, How-Tos and the like then you’d avoid long topic titles like “Can someone explain to me what server pilot is? is it just a software or are they a host as well?”. I’m no SEO expert but “What is a server pilot?” is more likely to be an actual search.
- etc.