Web 2.0 Supremacy: Forums and Message Boards
One of the best ways to get the people who visit your website to interact is to include a forum or message board on your website. This is a great way for users to register to join in discussions on whatever topic your site is about.
There are a ton of pluses to setting up forums, but it’s important to cover the downsides as well. First of all, the messages your users post will likely need to be moderated. There are drive by spammers and troublemakers who can mess your site up fast.
You will also need to work hard at first to get people interested in posting. This will mean driving a lot of traffic to your site and giving them a reason to stick around.
Another consideration is the amount of space the guests will take up on your server. If you have many members then the avatars, uploads, and signatures can overwhelm the available space if you’re not careful.
As long as you plan for those pitfalls you should be just fine. Forums truly are the best way to build relationships with your visitors, and to establish yourself as an expert on your topic.
Keep in mind that this is not going to happen overnight. There are new forums starting up all the time. Many of them die a fast death because the users and interest just aren’t there. However, if you take the time to build a community and keep things interesting your site’s forum will grow to great levels.
Don’t think that you need to do all of this hard work yourself either. You can add moderators to keep things interesting and keep the spammers away. You can pay moderators upfront, but you’ll find that you can get several volunteers if the activity level is high enough. People who become moderators enjoy keeping others in line and keeping the dialog on topic.
With all that being said, it is probably better to have no forum at all than to have a “dead” forum that no one goes to. You need to plan ahead and be sure to generate enough interest to keep people posting and interested for a long time to come. It bears repeating, this will be hard work, but it’s worth it in the end!
If you’re interested in starting your own forum you definitely need to pick good software to do it.
You can choose from:
- http://www.vbulletin.com
- http://www.phpbb.com
- http://getvanilla.com
- http://www.proboards.com/
- http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/forum/
- http://www.ezboard.com
- http://www.ivillage.com/messageboards
- http://www.boards2go.com
Related posts
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
[...] [...]