TopForumReviews.com: Maximize your forums true potential — Review

This post is a review of Top Forum Reviews. This review has not been paid for, I have cho­sen to review this web­site for free.

Top Forum Reviews is a new blog in which they will take a forum that either a user has sub­mit­ted, or a forum of their choice and review it on the blog. The blog is in a rel­a­tively untouched niche, and has some great poten­tial to suc­ceed­ing in the future.

Get­ting a review

Get­ting a review from them is easy. Just read how to get a review, sub­mit it, and the next day you should see your forum reviewed on their blog.

Regard­ing the review sys­tem, it’s pretty good for a free ser­vice. The reviews are of a decent size with plenty of infor­ma­tion on the forum. They list pros and cons of the forum in an orga­nized way, and at the end of the review they give the blog a let­ter grade. The let­ter sys­tem is A-F, with A being the best and F being the worst.

After read­ing a few reviews, I felt like I got a good under­stand­ing of the forum they reviewed. I couldn’t help but feel that some of the reviews just bounce all over the place. The writ­ing style could use some improve­ment, and some of the for­mat­ting of the posts could be improved. Taken from the Xbox 360 Forum Review:

In addi­tion, the con­troller sta­tus icons are a lit­tle bit large. The font is also too big.  For the user’s enter­tain­ment, there is an Arcade.

I feel as if the writ­ing kind of jumps off from one topic to another with­out really going into detail on the sub­ject. While I don’t see this is hap­pen in every post, it does have a few occur­rences around the blog.

The design of the blog

The design used on the blog is a pre-made theme from WP Remix. A great free theme, I feel like it was greatly inte­grated into the blog. It shows all the con­tent in a non obstruc­tive way, and that makes the reviews easy to read. They used to use the “Smash­ing Theme” from Design Dis­ease which I did like bet­ter. But they still have a pretty good sense in design.

One thing I don’t like about the post for­mat is how the images are used. Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that an image is used in the post. How­ever, I don’t like how all of the images are just a cut out of the forums logo.

For exam­ple, here are some of the images:

I know that the writer on the blog, Brad­ford Poole has some skill in Pho­to­shop and I think he can do a much bet­ter job of mak­ing a more appeal­ing image for his posts. I would sug­gest tak­ing a screen­shot of the web­site, make it smaller, and add some effects to it to make it look great. Even adding some for­mat­ting to them, and mak­ing the images align into the posts to either the left or right side.

Con­clud­ing Thoughts

All in all, I think what Top­Fo­rum­Re­views offers is a great ser­vice, and any forum owner should take advan­tage of it. Your forum will look good posted on their blog, and the best part is that it’s a 100% free service.

Some things to check out

Going through the blog, I have found some really cool stuff you should check out.

• Christ­mas Con­test — Win a paper­back copy “How to be a Rock­star Free­lancer” by Cyan + Col­lis Ta’eed and “Advanced Pro­fes­sional Web Design” by Clint Eccher.
• Arti­cle on how to effec­tively gain mem­bers through forum con­tests. It isn’t a review, but it makes some good points.
• My favorite review from TFR: EarnersTalk.com Review. This is a good exam­ple of a review by Top­Fo­rum Reviews.

Thanks for read­ing my first review on here, and I hope you have enjoyed it!

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