Hi Harrison,
The site is good for a starter into the market, especially with an established competing site.
I think there is always room for improvement... and a few lessons I have learnt over the years is to start a community in its most simple form. To me, you have too much going on for a starter forum.
I've been running forums for 20+ years, modding in them, admin and owner, so various roles within all of that time frame. What I'm writing here is in essence, the simple truth of lessons learnt.
- Get rid of the chat from public view. Traffic watching a shout box can cause your site serious detriment in load, as shout boxes aren't designed for heavy traffic viewing / participation. Make it entirely member only.
- Get rid of the blog and article system in use. Concentrate your time and effort in writing interesting forum topics that ask questions and beg for engagement from the readers. You want to do just one thing right when starting, and that is the forum topics. Then venture out IF the users really request such features later down the road.
- You are a brand new forum and have 30 very empty forum subjects available. You could cut all of that down to a total of five (5) broadly titled forums, so you have five busy forums instead of 30 empty, starving for attention forums. I have just over 30 forums after 10 years of content building and a million posts. Forum topics were derived based on user thread creation, NOT me just trying to make the site look experienced. One busy forum topic is better than 5 struggling for posts, forum topics. Example, the first three forums, and last two forums, could all be done as a single forum called, i.e. Administration.
- Honestly, remove the Facebook and twitter integration. They slow your page loading for starters, which affects user loading and search rankings, AND they actually cause significant privacy breaches to your users with automated tracking of their browsing just visiting a page that use FB / twitter type integrations. There are add-ons in the resource section here that are far better for content sharing on social networks, and don't cause any of the mentioned issues here.
- Background images... personal choice, but from a performance view, aesthetics too, they're a bit ordinary to look at and look more unprofessional, than anything, and just add another call to the user.
- You have a few issues with caching, or lack thereof, which you probably need to research and address. You can fix the issues from a simple .htaccess approach to broader CDN use approach, if you are a global site. Cloudflare is probably the best to cater your caching with CDN approach, and are free. That is a subject to probably Google and research though... as there are many solutions. But caching has a huge impact for your overall server performance, and more importantly, user experience.
That is purely my quick list of things I see that jump out to me immediately. Ignore them all, use what you feel may help your site. The biggest communities online today, typically contain the least features and focus everything on the content and user experience with that content. The web is very mobile now, and honestly, less is more today. You have a competitor already established, so what you do has to be different and much better, beyond just no ads, for people to want to change... as people join online communities because there are others there who they can instantly engage with.
You have to have such compelling, clear, concise and topical content to draw the audience in to you so they engage on your site, and not the competitors.
