Adding a Forum to Your Website

Adding an online community to your website can have many benefits. It is one of the best ways to increase repeat traffic to your site by giving your guests a way to connect more deeply with your product, service, or purpose. When considering the impact of implementing a forum on your website, the largest benefit to consider is user-generated content. Your guests may often have very important points to bring to a discussion - points that may have otherwise gone completely unnoticed.

This of course, lends itself to a sense of pride and ownership in your guests. Another benefit to consider is rate at which user-generated content grows. User-generated content grows far faster and generally contains more information than you could publish by yourself. This in turn, gives search engines more content to index your site by. If these benefits sound attractive to you, perhaps adding forum is something to seriously consider.

Once the decision has been made to add a forum to your website, the question is of course, how exactly does one get started? There are many factors to consider when adding a forum to your website. The first question you should ask yourself is how will your website’s niche dictate the interaction on the board? Will a simple discussion board suffice, or will you need a board that is more suited for community interaction? After you have answered this question, the next question you should ask yourself is, “If I were a user on this board, what kind of tools would I need to communicate my ideas most effectively, in the easiest way possible”?  After carefully considering these factors, you should look at your options.

There are two types of boards to download for use on your site, free boards and paid boards. When deciding between free or paid forum software, you should ask yourself how much time you can spend on setting up your forum. If you don’t have much time to devote to fine-tuning the options in your forum, or rewriting lines of code, you should maybe opt for a paid board. This type board is stable, programmers have already done all of the work, and most have very user friendly interfaces used to change the boards options without having to know any code. This is, of course not to say that all free boards require a lot of work, as there are free forums that are very well designed.

However, if a paid board seems like the right fit, you can download vBulletin for a one time licensing fee. This board is very flexible, and easy to use. Because it is a paid board, if any technical issues arise, you have a dedicated technical support group to assist you. With free forum software packages such as Vanilla or phpBB, you get support through a very robust community of developers that are willing to volunteer their free time.

Whichever type of board you decide to go for needs to be installed on your sever. Most boards come with their own specific instructions on how to do this, but it is generally done the same way. The first thing you need to do is check with your hosting company to see if your server can utilize PHP, and if you have access to a MySQL database. Most hosting companies do have these capabilities on their servers as well as frequently asked questions pages dedicated to these subjects. If your server has the capabilities, you need to FTP the forum software to your server. Once the folder containing all of the forum’s information is on your server, you must open your web browser and navigate to its location. If the folder containing the information is named “forum” for instance, you would point your browser to “yourwebsite.com/forum”. This will start the installation process, and in minutes you will have a forum on your website.

Now that you have a forum on your website, it is time to capitalize on those benefits that were mentioned earlier. Any unrealistic expectations you have about the growth of your website’s online community will be dispelled here. The very first thing to realize is that a robust online community does not grow overnight. In fact, like most things that grow, your forum must be looked after, and maintained on a regular basis. A website lives and dies by its content and an online community lives and dies by its people. The best way to bring people into your forum is promotion. Go to other websites that are in your niche and promote. Visit other forums with a link to your own forum in your signature. Promote your website on social networking sites. Do the necessary footwork.

You should also establish a cohesive culture in your forum, which attracts the type of people that will enrich the environment inside your forum. It is this culture that people in your forum will protect, weeding out disruptive people and providing an even deeper sense of community and belonging to your regular guests.