Thank you ... yes, I've worked very, very hard here and really appreciate you noticing. The site has been around for about a year.

I think the main problem is that there are just so many other really good computer-related forums that there is such heavy competition out there.

As for our traffic ... we do get a very decent amount. (Search engines bring us an average of a little over 100 unique visitors per day) The problem is that very few people actually register or contribute compared to the amount of traffic we get. Most of our visitors come in via the search engines directly to certain threads, where they get the info they want, and leave (never even seeing our login/register page).

I've ran out of ideas to hook people. I was thinking of putting the register/login form directly on all of our pages (so everyone would see it) but that just seems like it would clutter everything up so much.

Another major problem right now is the host. The site goes down A LOT (and I mean A LOT). So that's an enormous turn-off I'm sure. I'm working on resolving this right now. (On hold with tech support as I write this actually.) Hopefully this problem will be fixed VERY SHORTLY!

Personally I like the 3d style better too. But most people don't which is why I made the flat version the default.

Yeah, I'm going to go right now to see if I can improve on my keywords. (Hopefully I'll get somewhere!)

We get about 300 unique hits per day, about 100 of those come out of search engines. We also get hits from our "affiliate" sites that we exchange links with. But I'm still sure that a majority of the remaining 2/3 are from people like me, you, tekmaven, inscissor, and aeinstein who visit the boards often.

Well, off I go to see if I could improve my keywords and description tags! Wish me luck!

As for CodeMonkeyX, he wrote the php script that I use to display the latest news on the TechTalk homepage. I was one of his first beta testers and he was very helpful in helping me get started.

As you may already know, the forum software this site is based off of is called phpBB. CodeMonkeyX posted a thread on phpBB regarding his news hack which became very popular. On the first post of his thread, he put a link to TechTalk as the example site for anyone to see what the news hack looks like before they download it. I received a lot of visitors that way which is why I wanted to return the favor and link back to his site.

EDIT: BTW thank you for pointing that out! (that he's not linking back to me) I could use people like you to make sure my affiliates aren't deleting my link (haha just kidding)

How about this?



Is this a lil better? What can I do to improve on it? I remember reading that it's a bad idea if you use a particular word or phrase more than once in your keywords. So I didn't want to keep saying C++ programming, Java programming, VB programming, web dev programming, etc. (The same goes for "forums" and "tutorials")

Nice idea though, being able to select the style.

Addendum: It's a simple idea really. All that happens are the .css file is swapped out depending on which version you pick. All of the code, itself, stays the same.

Style sheets are very simple to implement and it can really make your life a whole lot easier when you're trying to make an entire site have a consistant look and feel. There's also some stuff you can only do w/ css such as not making links be underlined that you can't do with html.

Plus there are a lot of resources on the web with a listing of available properties you have a choice of. You may wish to take a look at style sheets if you've never played around w/ them before, just for curiosity's sake. They're a pretty simple concept though (especially if you're proficient in HTML).

BTW were you able to find this thread OK? I'm sure you noticed I created a new forum for TechTalk related stuff. I figured I'd weed out the Random Stuff forum.

Hey Mister Scarce! Welcome back ;) hehe

bob:

I'm getting a "runtime error" popup everytime I try to visit your site? ;)