Forum Help

Hanneman213

Hi guys,

I am currently trying to help create an online presence for a local record store and one of the ideas I am considering is creating a forum for the store. It currently doesn't have an official site, just a Facebook account, MySpace, etc, so I'm guessing it would be an indpendant forum, something along the lines of say Nuclear War Now. I'm just looking for a bit of advice on this.

1)How much would it cost to set up a forum?
2)What sites/programmes are best to use?
3)Does hosting a forum cost the same as hosting a website?

I've been messing around with www.forumotion.com, which allows you make a free forum and that seems kind of cool, but I'm not sure if it professional enough.

Does anyone have any advice/suggestions about creating a forum? I've posted this in 3 places because im not sure which forum its best suited too (its also in internet marketing & web development, so moderator, please feel free to delete the posts which are in the wrong place).

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!

Chet Zar

Hanneman213 wrote: »

Hi guys,

I am currently trying to help create an online presence for a local record store and one of the ideas I am considering is creating a forum for the store. It currently doesn't have an official site, just a Facebook account, MySpace, etc, so I'm guessing it would be an indpendant forum, something along the lines of say Nuclear War Now. I'm just looking for a bit of advice on this.

1)How much would it cost to set up a forum?

Nothing if you use a free programme like phpBB. Fairly straightforward to set up, or you could get someone to set it up for you.

2)What sites/programmes are best to use?

phpBB, which is free, or vBulletin (which Boards runs on), which is a fee based programme.

3)Does hosting a forum cost the same as hosting a website?

Unless the forum is going to be really big (unlikely in most cases), pretty much. You can run a forum off the same hosting package as a website.

Any particular reason why you want to get exposure for the site using a forum specifically? You can get instant exposure for a site using Facebook, Twitter, a blog and - over time - with SEO. With a forum you need people willing to post topics, reply to threads, etc, which can take a bit of effort and probably wouldn't pay off in the way the above other options would.

Hanneman213

Cheers for the advice!

We are working on a facebook, Twitter and blog at the same time as the forum. The store already has a very dedicated, core group of customers who are active on other forums and our thinking behind creating our own forum is that it would be a place where all of the customers could converse together, with each other and the store, rather than the store having to set up and post on a number of different forums. They simply don't have the time for that.

Would setting up and running our own forum be even more time consuming than that?

Chet Zar

Hanneman213 wrote: »

Cheers for the advice!

We are working on a facebook, Twitter and blog at the same time as the forum. The store already has a very dedicated, core group of customers who are active on other forums and our thinking behind creating our own forum is that it would be a place where all of the customers could converse together, with each other and the store, rather than the store having to set up and post on a number of different forums. They simply don't have the time for that.

Would setting up and running our own forum be even more time consuming than that?

Got you - that's great! You can definitely combine a forum with all of the above and they'll all work together. I guess I'd just be clear on what you hope to achieve with the forum. It's not a case of 'build it and they'll come' - at least not at first, as it takes members and posts to build a community and the store's customers may not move to the new forum immediately if there is already a large community that they are a part of elsewhere. It's definitely worth setting up and integrating with the other efforts though, and you'll probably find that a community starts to build up gradually. Only one way to find out!