For quite some time (months) we've had a choice of styles you can use to browse TechTalk, but hardly anyone has taken advantage of this. Therefore, I'm just going to clarify how this is done in case anyone is curious.

If you're a member, just go to the Profile link in the top menubar. Scroll down towards the bottom and one of the options will be Style. You have the option of techtalk3D or techtalkFlat. The 3D option makes each table cell have a beveled effect. The flat option uses more of the navy blue and it a bit bolder.

The 3d style used to be the default for guests and new members but now the flat style is. Therefore, if you've been a member for awhile, and didn't bother changing this option, you should be seeing the 3d version. If you're a guest user or a new member, by default you'll see our flat style.

Enjoy!

I prefer the 3d style, by far. Nice idea though, being able to select the style.

The whole site is well presented, and you're to be congratulated on your good work. I can't understand why you don't get more activity in your forums as I would have expected many people to find the site potentially useful. What's your search engine coverage like? Could you expand your keywords at all? Add ones such as Novell, C++, Visual Basic? Must be plenty more.

Perhaps some people are put off by the low level of traffic on the forums - you need to reach a critical mass and then it should start to really take off.

But congratulations on the good work - the foundations have been laid, just need to get more people participating.

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.

I think you should be able to improve significantly on 100 unique hits per day, as good as that sounds, and would still advise you to add more keywords. Take a look at the site and consider what it's about, jot down the words that matter, then check out your keywords and see what you might consider is missing.

For example, you have forums for C++, Java and Visual Basic, but they don't appear in the list of keywords. Same with Mac and Novell. Sure, these keywords will get millions of matches so trying to get to the top of the pile will be difficult, but match them with other keywords, such as forum, tutorial, beginners, etc and who knows.

Couldn't find a link to your site at CodeMonkeyX - you link to theirs.

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?

<meta name="keywords" content="computer forum, computer tech support, windows 2000 XP help, web development database, computer science theory, comp sci theory, apple mac OS X, novell forum, network internet, programming code, c++ java code snippets, visual basic ASP help, free computer support help, web development databases, programming tutorial reference, unix redhat mandrake linux, windows operating system, gaming hardware, computer software">

<meta name="description" content="Get free tech support, computer tips, and tutorials with our pc forums. Listing of computer resources and links. Software help for operating systems such as Windows, Mac, and Novell. Hardware and networking news. C++, Java, Visual Basic, and web development programming references and tutorials. Download code snippets for you to use in your programs.">

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")

Yeah, does look better. I think some search engines get funny about descriptions that are much longer than about 25 words, or used to. Keywords - you can have loads.

I guess it will take a little while before you can see whether the additional keywords are having an effect, but they can't do any harm.

Fingers crossed!

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.