Help from fellow admin to a noob

Hi all,



This is my fisrt post so please take it easy on me but I do need some honesty from you. I have created a forum that has been running for about a month. Here are the stats,

• 1,469 Visits

• 22,278 Pageviews

• 15.17 Pages/Visit

• 10.96% Bounce Rate

• 00:09:48 Avg. Time on Site

• 37.51% % New Visits

My site is here http://www.southeastsxs.com and it has been up for about 4 weeks. The problem is I seem to be having trouble getting people to convert to members. I wanted to ask the opinion of people that have been doing this for a while. I am a noob at this but really want to make it fly.

Any help would be much appreciated. I am considering collapsing the forums, as you will see I have them broken out for each type of vehicle and I wonder if it is too much and I should collapse them all so the catergories remain just not broken out into vehicles.

What do you think?

 

1st off, welcome to AA
2nd, you have a ton of empty forums
SouthEastSxS.com
why not hide some of those until you have enough post that you need to separate them out?

 

yeah, theres way too many sections which dont have any posts in, its always best to start off small-i started off my forum with 10 sections, which makes it look more active, and you can add more when your forum is older and gets more posts. a good thing to do when youve started a forum is create a few threads in each section

 

You have way to many forums which half of them could be edited and made into a whole complete forum. Also a forum looks bad if its full of empty areas. Either try and create topics or hide them.

 

Agreed, you should really fill those empty forums, or even hide them until you gain more members. I would suggst offering them something worthwhile for joining up. What do yuo currently offer someone that registers apart from a bunch of empty forums? (don't mean to be forward, but it's the truth).

 

I have to agree with the common criticism that you have too big a forum board set up.That would be fine later on when you have a lot more members and traffic to work with.

However I think your theme layout is very nice and clean.

It takes time for most forums to take off.Yours is not even 2 months old yet.Patience is the ideal at this stage.