UK finance forum - a review

Finance Markets recently changed the look of their website and UK finance forum. They wanted to get a review of the new look forum of their website. So I registered on the forum to experience how it is like before reviewing.

A forum dedicated to discussions on finance anywhere would, expectedly, have similar kind of discussions. The forum is no exception and has all kind of threads of discussions. The discussions are divided into three main categories - Finance, Investing, and General. Each category is then further subdivided into different groups e.g. in Finance they have Banking, Loans, Mortgage, etc. I feel while it is nice to divide them into so many different groups, it somehow fragments the category too much and browsing the forums becomes more cumbersome. Instead, if they had just the main categories, it could be better. Since it is not a heavy traffic forum yet, this could give users a better experience.

The topics of discussion in the forum vary from "how do I save money to invest" to "where should I invest", to any other topic one could come up with related to finance and investments. In addition, the "General" category has threads on other non-finance topics as well.

The look and layout of the forum is not intuitive. In fact, one would immediately feel he has seen such layout many times in other forums. It looks like this is the most common format for online forums.

There are a few hundred registered users in the forum. The traffic is not high; there are entire stretches of weeks with not a single posting in some groups. That is one of the reasons they are pushing on getting the word out about the forum. People interested in Finance and Investment, specially in the UK, could register and might find their answers in this forum.