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I actually thought he was being pretty nice there.
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Yeah fez you're getting the wrong idea.
What I'm saying is, that people will only go to a forum if it's A: the only one around, or B: the best one around. Doing B is nearly impossible, and is usually only possible if your forum was the first on the scene. People will not change to another forum when the one they are already on is the best of its type.
Here are a few top pointers:
You need originality. As much as you may want to make an Oddworld Forum, or Oddworld fansite, there is no demand for them and your efforts would be wasted. Try to think of something else you could do. Something you've tried to search for on the net and just reached a dead end. That is where your potential is.
Now that you've got your idea, you can start to build up your website around it. Things like guestbooks, about me pages, and rules are the LEAST visited - omit them if you can. Instead of "links" type in "useful links" - this helps your visitors realise that they might find more of what they are looking for if they check them out.
Also, when composing your website, remember that visitors have a short attention span, keep the text down to a bare minimum, and don't put more than you need anywhere. Think about what they will be looking for when they get to your site, and make it easy for them to reach it. Don't make them have to go through miles and miles of pages before they get to what they want.
Keep in mind that Updates are rarely read, and are only read out of boredom - don't waste too much time on them. And flashy little graphics all over the place looks horrid - animated construction workers are a big no no.
Don't create content or sections just for the sake of filling up space. Put what you need where you need it, then sculpt that into something attractive. Readers won't pour over every part of the page, they will skim it, keeping their eye out for key words. Make sure you think about this, and try to cut it down so that visitors can read what they need to know as quickly as possible.
Remember, appearance is something that can be worked on later. Your layout should be purely functional, and help with accessability. At the end of the day, an ugly site that's easy to use, will end up getting more hits than a pretty site that's hard to use.
Be conventional - make things blindingly obvious to visitors. Don't try to be a pioneer by putting your navigational links somewhere strange. Put them where the user can expect to find them. The same goes with content. You want the user to feel "at home" browsing the site.
And that's about all you need to know. Feel free to copy and paste this into a notepad file for later reference. You can always PM me if there is any more you wish to know, although I think I've pretty much covered everything here. Hope you find it helpful.
: Lets see you have slogs,slegs... um.. and thats it!
