Dn Lodge ^-^

[Brandon]

What do you think of dnlodge so far? haha

[Domain]

It looks very nice! I love the layout! When I log in I feel at home. Better than some of the other competitors.

Great job!

[digit]

good resource, just needs to grow.

For some reason I love the footer and the Back To Top arrow.

[Brandon]

Thanks for your comments, Dn Lodge is starting to grow faster and faster every day, almost to our 1500 post point, with almost 60 members.

[WebHost]

Yea Dn Lodge is growing fast, I hope to see it grow some more!

[Brandon]

I think Dn Lodge is doing very good for the age, only above 2 months right?

[fbiboy]

Love it, simple and plain, nothing too fancy and not boring. Excellent job! Just needs more activity, I am sure it will grow big within the next month!

[Jas]

Well I hope so to! I cant wait to see it become higher than sitepoint, and me having one of the oldest acounts!

[cpvr]

It looks nice, just needs more activity - learn to promote more, stop the little kid post exchanges, do the big boy ones 50+ posts.
This community started a month after mine, and my community is close to 20k posts, but this one is not.

What's up with that? Less promotion or?

[Yowser]

I think Brandon would agree that for either of us to find time to make 50+ posts on several other forums and not neglect our own would be a bit of a challenge, with our current schedules.

Brandon has done a bang-up job of working on more long-term promotion like getting some great backlinks and search engine traffic. Time will tell if its gonna pay off. I believe it will.

[cpvr]

Originally Posted by Rooted

I think Brandon would agree that for either of us to find time to make 50+ posts on several other forums and not neglect our own would be a bit of a challenge, with our current schedules.

Brandon has done a bang-up job of working on more long-term promotion like getting some great backlinks and search engine traffic. Time will tell if its gonna pay off. I believe it will.

I do too, but don't you believe you guys need to focus on short-term as well? Short term goals help set the future goals.

He can build up backlinks and search engine traffic all he wants, but they won't mean crap without the activity to back it up.

"Neglect our own", what do you mean by this? Try to do 5, 10, 15 post exchanges with other forums - stop making Dnlodge look like a link site, instead of a forum. I come here and see like 20+ links whored all over the site, don't have people posts for links, that doesn't work - engage in small post exchanges instead, it helps.

If I had the time, I'd help you guys promote Dnlodge, but unfortunately I don't.

Believe me.

[Brandon]

cprv, I find it disrespecful to compare your forum with mine. We are on TOTALLY different fields of the industry.

First off, the forum that is 1 month less older than your site is not worthy to compare to dnlodge. Only because you had a site that was getting probably over 500 uniques a day, if not over a thousand, (from what you've told me), and then you added a forum ONTO it. Starting a forum from scratch is more of a chalenge.

Rooted and I have a dream, weather we set it in stone or not, that we want to make DN Lodge comforting to its current members, and welcomming to our guests. That is why we got vBulletin. We felt vBulletin was a HUGE step up from all those cruddy free ones, and that our members would appreciate us getting it. Since then, our traffic almost doubled.

When you say our links "won't mean crap" , I desagree. We are thinking and doing most of what we've been doing to benefit us greatly in the long run. The links we are trying to get HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH trying to get traffic. These are to raise the PR. After our first or second month of opening, our site was hit by a PR update, and reached a PR 3. That was when we were on phpbb. Now that I got all these high PR links, some over PR 6, we will surely jump to a 4 or 5.

Heres what you said in your previous post.....

This community started a month after mine, and my community is close to 20k posts, but this one is not. What's up with that? Less promotion or?

Again, you have a site with people that go there every day. Then YOU ADDED ON the forum. Its like if I owned sitepoint (pretending it had no forum with it already) and then plopped in a forum on the site, it would grow VERY FAST since we have thousands of people going there already. We dont have this opportunity. In the long run, I wont be supprised to have more than sitepoint and dnforum combined. That is how much I am dedicated to this site, along with rooted.

And that is also the reason I am so defensive. I felt hurt when you told us I wasnt promoting as much as you were, working on it as much as you were, etc. You mad it sound like I am neglecting the site, and not working on it much. I work on it over 3 hours daily, which is way more than is needed to run it.

So bare in mind, that also we are trying to providing a community with resources, which is the reason behind our webtools section. We want to give members a huge aray of resources all without leaving the site, and include an easy way to navigate it, which is why I currently customized the new navigation column.

Hope I dont sound too or overly defensive, I just wanted to express my feelings of what I felt when you said we may not have been promoting as much as you, or doing the right moves, or whatever you want to say/call it.

-Brandon, CEO & Co-Administrator

[cpvr]

Originally Posted by Brandon

cprv, I find it disrespecful to compare your forum with mine. We are on TOTALLY different fields of the industry.

First off, the forum that is 1 month less older than your site is not worthy to compare to dnlodge. Only because you had a site that was getting probably over 500 uniques a day, if not over a thousand, (from what you've told me), and then you added a forum ONTO it. Starting a forum from scratch is more of a chalenge.

Rooted and I have a dream, weather we set it in stone or not, that we want to make DN Lodge comforting to its current members, and welcomming to our guests. That is why we got vBulletin. We felt vBulletin was a HUGE step up from all those cruddy free ones, and that our members would appreciate us getting it. Since then, our traffic almost doubled.

When you say our links "won't mean crap" , I desagree. We are thinking and doing most of what we've been doing to benefit us greatly in the long run. The links we are trying to get HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH trying to get traffic. These are to raise the PR. After our first or second month of opening, our site was hit by a PR update, and reached a PR 3. That was when we were on phpbb. Now that I got all these high PR links, some over PR 6, we will surely jump to a 4 or 5.

Heres what you said in your previous post.....

This community started a month after mine, and my community is close to 20k posts, but this one is not. What's up with that? Less promotion or?

Again, you have a site with people that go there every day. Then YOU ADDED ON the forum. Its like if I owned sitepoint (pretending it had no forum with it already) and then plopped in a forum on the site, it would grow VERY FAST since we have thousands of people going there already. We dont have this opportunity. In the long run, I wont be supprised to have more than sitepoint and dnforum combined. That is how much I am dedicated to this site, along with rooted.

And that is also the reason I am so defensive. I felt hurt when you told us I wasnt promoting as much as you were, working on it as much as you were, etc. You mad it sound like I am neglecting the site, and not working on it much. I work on it over 3 hours daily, which is way more than is needed to run it.

So bare in mind, that also we are trying to providing a community with resources, which is the reason behind our webtools section. We want to give members a huge aray of resources all without leaving the site, and include an easy way to navigate it, which is why I currently customized the new navigation column.

Hope I dont sound too or overly defensive, I just wanted to express my feelings of what I felt when you said we may not have been promoting as much as you, or doing the right moves, or whatever you want to say/call it.

-Brandon, CEO & Co-Administrator

The site was receiving a lot of traffic before I added the forum? Wrong, was only averaging around 200 uniques daily.

I agree that I shouldn't compare, but you're community has a lot of topics that cover the same as mine, so comparision is needed.

Maybe I should stop commenting and try to help you guys promote, you should talk to me more on msn.

[aboyd]

Well, back to the original question....

I think what Dn Lodge is doing right so far is the nice logo & design, the Webmaster tools (which I assume are just canned scripts, but you've integrated them with your design, and your backlink checker results were more informative than I've seen @ other sites), and the organization of the forums itself. I mean, when I look at the various areas, there is a lot that appeals to me.

Where Dn Lodge could use some help is in the consistency. As I'm looking around, there seems to be a big gap in the posts. Something happened four weeks ago (a marketing push?) that caused the site to get some posts, but then it went mostly quiet until this week. Looking back at the posts, it's a bit frustrating to see the list of topics in each forum has a bunch of month-old posts, just a few links down the page.

I'm not sure how to fix that. I suspect that doing steady advertising instead of promoting in a burst and then leaving it for a while might help. Whatever the case, it's a good start. Congratulations.

-Tony

[Brandon]

Yes, thanks for your comments.

[Yowser]

Yea, I would say the recent slump was a bit out of the ordinary for this forum, based on the relatively short history that we have, and was even a bit of a surprise to Brandon and myself.

I did discover since that time that some of the members and moderators who have been really committed to helping this forum move forward had unforseen circumstances that arose during that time that made it difficult for them to be here. I believe that is beginning to change and we are snapping back well. We really appreciate all of you who stuck it out with us and have contributed to its success even through that slow couple of weeks.

[Brandon]

Perfectly said Rooted.

[Free]

my thoughts on the forum:
loads very fast. I won't return too often (if at all) to a forum that takes a long time to load
very clean , bright and organized
I love the web tools section and think they'll only get better
I think a short description on the header would be good for newbies to the site
a very good forum imo. just needs more quality posting

[Brandon]

Thanks.. I've noticed its faster than many others too... Glad you like! I've worked on it alot.

[Jas]

DN Lodge has been growing... I saw the directory and the newly added resource center... nice job!