Some suggestions- My thoughts

[08micsta]

Hello guys

I apologise if this is in the wrong section. I didnt see any "forum suggestions" section and normal users cant post in the forum news section.

Just a few ideas I was playing around with which might make the forum a little more user-friendly.

Please try understand that I am not flaming. But simply making suggestion as I have seen done on the many other forums Im on.

Here we go:

1. The forum banner- The BMW is awesome. I like it... But its huge... The banner alone means that everytime you click a link your pc needs to download about 700kb before even loading the page... Thats a lot. Thats close to a MB.... This slows things down big time. If you want I can using the BMW theme or maybe change it and come up with something smaller that will load quicker and wont take up a full screen.

On the same note the actual site name cant be seen. The colour contrasts are not very strong and on some computers you just see this huge picture. Once again. I would gladly come up with something a bit more eye friendly.

2. This as far as I know is quite a big job.... The colour scheme.... We launched a forum last year and the colour scheme was red and black... The first thing people noticed were how much more welcoming the theme was. many people complimented it compared to the old site. Maybe we should do a small change? Go with a warm colour and some nice contrasts. Once again. Its merely a suggestion. I dont mind the forum the way it is but just relaying my thoughts.

3. Avertising. The only reason I ran into this forum was because Carn invited me to join. I didnt even know it existed.

So heres the idea. Lets get the name out there.

- Add a "refferal" option. That way we can chat to people on other forums and they can click the refferal link as supplied by us and join up. Its not important that all our members be South African. Get the name out there no matter what.

- Lets get some shows running. We have a hugee amount of companies out there that are willing to have us do demo's. Whilst researchin for Liqui Moly and getting people who will write recommendations and almost everyone is willing. We need to get together as groups and do some detailing. Ask Blooms for a car and do a detail on the show room floor with banners and such. Get the attention and get people to register. Besides just that there will be more orders as people see the brands and are introduced to Detailing.

4. Create a homepage. Now Im not so sure on this one as to be honest I have not seen a webpage for us yet but if we do already have one I apologise... Most forums take you to a homepage. Then from there you enter the forum. Something simple like this:

http://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk

In there we can have news, details and such. We can have benefits of detailing and other info which will captivate and interest a new member. So far all a new member see's is the forum on google. Then he sees the forum index which took quite a while to load on his slowish net connection.... It doesnt really attract people if you know what I mean

I had a few other ideas but cant really think of them at the moment. Once again. Not flaming. Just suggesting. We currently have something like 150 members of which only about 15 actually communicate. Lets try get that to 300 members, and 50 members that openly communicate within two months. I think its attainable.

What do you guys think?

What other suggestions do you guys have? This forum in my eyes has huge potential and I reckon we should really get it out there.

Please do realise. Im not trying to be the boss man around here. Thats Don's job but I would also like to have a forum that is SA based that is bursting with more info and more members and more awesome write ups. This is why Im making the suggestions.

I look forward to hearing everyones opinions on this.

Mike