Article

[Tyria]

An Article I found on a website. I forgot the name. but I posted it on my site (In the Admin forum of course). Thought it might be helpful to share.

Avoid Board Overkill
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Published June 3rd, 2006 by Juvenall Wilson
Tags: bulletin boards, forum marketing, tips.

Did you know that the way your community is set up could be chasing away random visitors from registering and posting new content on your site? That's right, the hours you spent trying to turn your default software package into a work of art could actually be hurting your chances of success. The likely culprate: an overabundance of boards.


Now, don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying a forum with 20+ boards is doomed to failure. Two minutes over at OffTopic.com clearly shows otherwise. The problem, however, is you likely don't have that kind of traffic to support those boards. So if you're trying to copy that format, you're going to be filled with dead, empty space.

That's where the problem comes in. I don't know about you, but if I have a choice between talking to myself or jumping into an existing conversation with others, the later wins hands down. It's the same thing to a random visitor. That dead, empty space is a big red flag that they should look elsewhere. After all, one look at ForumFox shows that for every dead board, there's two more with content to take it's place.

So naturally, you need to fill in that space with something useful to visitors. Since you're new and have a limited traffic, you'll need to give off the semblance that you're a busy, active community. Doing this is simply a matter of condensing your community down to a small handful of boards.

As an example, lets say you're starting a community dedicated to video games. A common approach would be to create boards for each console.

Video Games

PC Games
Playstation
Playstation Portable
NES
Super Nintendo
Nintendo 64
Nintendo Game Cube
Nintendo Wii
XBox
XBox 360
NeoGeo
With a metric assload of traffic, that would be a fantastic way to keep things in order. Since you're just starting out, however, the best method would be to simply break it up in to more borad groupings. So we go 11+ boards to this:

Video Games

Computer Games
Current Consoles
Old Consoles
This change gives your forum a much more active feel. Instead of 11 boards with (lets say) 10 posts in each, you have 3 boards with 36 posts each. Additionally, it also provides you the additional benefit of making the user's job of finding the right board to post in less of a pain. In the long run, this alone will manifest itself into an increase in registrations.

In general, my rule of thumb is no more than 6-8 boards total. This includes a single off-topic board (great for building closer communities) and an announcement board. While one or two over that won't kill you, make sure you can honestly justify them. As your site grows, so can the number of your boards. Trust me, it's worth the wait.

 

[Merlin]

Interesting.

 

[Loucifer]

This was very interesting - and very true.

 

[vienchaua10]

I really like because it's so cool :great: :great: :great: