Could a good forum help you survive?...

Can a forum on your website help you stay in touch with people, or find you people who may be looking for you?
Our forum gets about 30 to 50 hits each day over the last few months, no it certainly is not a busy one, and only today we have put another area on it for health advise from a Doctor who is a member.
The thing where most forums die off is that they force you to join before you are allowed a look to see if it suits your needs.
People do not want to have to give everyone an e mail adrs to log-in, or choose a password that you forget by the time you leave the forum, so never going back.
Let your visitors have a play a few weeks, if they like it they will join, if our members do join they can view more forum areas, if they do not join they see only a few.
http://alternative4u.proboards.com/index.cgi
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www.Alternative4u.co.uk

Re : Could a good forum help you survive?

I quite like community sites, so personally I find sites that have some sort of forum or means of interacting to be better than those where there is no such facility.

However to some extent it depend on the nature of the site: for instance when I go to a site to buy something like M&S or say Currys online etc then I don't really expect to see a forum there as I just want to get in, make a purchase if I see what I like, and get out... so it does depend.

But in general I see forums as a positive thing: the problem is trying to encourage their active use!

Re : Could a good forum help you survive?

I tend to agree with Lianne.

A forum that has a reasonable number of posts in it can definitely be a big positive to a site. For one if people engage in conversations on the forum then it will bring them back to the site again and again as they wait to see what comments people have posted on comments they have made, and indeed join in other people's conversations or posts. So that's a big plus.

On the negative side, an empty forum can either seem a little pointless, or even suggest to users who stumble across it that the site is not that popular which could potentially put them off buying (if it is a site with a product, of course).

There are millions and millions of web users out there these days, but then there are millions of forums attached on the side of sites, too. Whether there are enough people to post in all the forums, I'm not so sure. I suspect the success lies in someone who is involved in a site actively posting in the forums to keep topics fresh and stimulate debate, and also to integrate the site as much as possible so it looks like part of the site, rather than being a third party template tool that is tacked on to the website as an afterthought somewhere down the line.
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Web Design

Re : Could a good forum help you survive?

I'm visiting various UK forums to see which works best for me - and it might be that I keep up with several.

It's an opportunity for self-promotion but it's also a great way to learn from others and to be inspired.

Andrew

Re : Could a good forum help you survive?

Hope you keep up with this forum then Andrew

It's a bit slow at times but in between deleting spam I find there are some interesting conversations!