You are a big Sonic fan, you see a great Sonic fourm, and you wish to make and show off a forum of your own, right? Right. You’re not the only one. Unfortunately for you, most people frown upon forums here. This is not because the people here hate forums. That would be a silly thing. It is because most (if not all) of the forums here do not meet the standard required to be a decent all-around, professional forum.
Before you even get started, you should seek answers as to why you want to run your own forum and if you'll be dedicated enough to stick to it. Who hasn’t seen someone’s brand new forums and asked the question, what’s the point?
So how can you make yours? If you are unsure, you probably can’t. If you are advertising it as a forum, and don't have a website for it, then it’s likely to fail due to nothing to pull members in. There are, however, things to pull in members if you only have a forum and no website, but it is hard to pull off.
General Tips:
- Hosting some sort of project on your forum can help. You’ll need a popular project to host that is creative though. I'll leave that up to your imagination.
- Forums with roleplays and other communal activities can attract people, although roleplayers are not known for being common. You may have to market it to a wide audience.
- Giving your forum elements that make it like a website could also make it successful. For example: A locked forum which contains all of your opinions, content, features, etc. This basically is making a website the lazy way without it being completely trash.
- You NEED to be different. Don't just copy a bigger forum and expect it to be great. If you can't make your forum different from what's out there, who will want to join it? It has to be creative in the forum name, category names, forum names, forum descriptions, etc. Otherwise who will go to your forum when they have an endless supply of alternatives that are the same AND have a thriving community.
- Forum names should ideally have less than 3 words... Do not go to a thesaurus and use words that don't make sense. Please use words with the proper meaning.
- Do NOT require guests to sign up to view your board. I CAN'T STRESS THIS ENOUGH! Ideally, you should allow the guests to view all sections of your board. You want them to join, and the best way to do that is let them view what there is to discuss.
- Don’t flood your forum with empty topics. Something people usually do is create about 20 different topics that remain empty for some time and make the forum look inactive. You and your team have to drive debate and discussion.
- Creating a bunch of members and posting can be very helpful. Have some conversations with yourself, but don't make it obvious or have uninspired converstations. This will generate something that appears to not be a dead forum.
- If you need to ask for help on most aspects of your forum and can't make a decent forum on your own, you're not well suited to be making your own forum. That's not to say asking for help on your forum is a bad idea, it is always good to have someone help you with ideas, but you should have a well thought out forum before you ask for help.
- Advertise, advertise, advertise! Anywhere you can. You can advertise on many similar forums for starters. Try to be creative in how/where you advertise. For example, on Myspace/Youtube if you have an account there. If you have a domain and it's not too long, maybe sign up to a forum with a user name that's the same as your forum url.
- Simply having a thriving community can attract more people, but you’re going to need a thriving community first.
Appearance Tips:
Also, the appearance of your forum is a crucial part of its success. It can make all the difference whether a visitor leaves immediately, signs up - then leaves, signs up, says hello, then leaves, or signs up and makes ten posts every day, becoming an established member and recommending your forum wherever they go.
- Highly-contrasting eye-searing colors are not going to help. Tone them down. Drab colours may not be exciting, but they are comfortable.
- The font you use can have an effect. It does not appear large, so intricate fonts will either lose their intricacy or become unreadable. Fonts that use all capitals can be uncomfortable to some – you may not need to remove them, but be sure to provide a standard alternative if you use them. And for pity’s sake don’t use Comic Sans. Nobody likes it.
- Your banner is the first image people will see on your forum. Hence, there are certain guidelines you should follow. The most crucial point is the size. Huge square banners that take up half the screen are not interesting or attractive. The size should have a width of between 400 and 800 and a height of between 100 and 200. Resized sprites are a bad thing, and try to keep its contents as original as possible.
- A background is not that important. You don’t have to have one, but if you do, make sure it tiles.
- Custom skins are always the best! They add personality and uniquness to your board. Try to make your own custom skin, or find someone on a graphics forum who will do it for you. If you must have a premade skin, at least chose one that follows the theme of your board.
- Icons are the last aesthetic point to mention. Generally, unique icons are good and show personality. However, try to keep them roughly the same size as the standard icons, and avoid bad resizing, dithering, artefacts or coloured outlines. Also, be sure to make them transparent – nobody likes to see coloured blocks.
- The layout of your forum must be well put together. This means all forums that are related to a certain subject go under one category, instead of scattered across different categories. Also do not have disproportional categories with 8 forums in one category and only 2 in another.
Management Tips:
Management is everything. Once you have members, you want to keep them, and there are some guidelines you should follow:
- Have a solid rule set and punishment system. Let people know when they’re going wrong. Make your rules neither too strict nor too lenient, and try to leave as few gray areas as possible. If in doubt, either forbid something completely or not at all.
- Don’t have too many sub-forums, certainly in the forum’s early stages. You’ll want to make your forum look popular, so having posts spread out as little as possible helps. Condense your forum to start with, so that you have a forum for discussion, one for off-topic discussion/forum games/randomness/advertising, and one for whatever your forum’s focus is. Split your forums when they get too large, but until them keep them as few as possible. SB started with just five forums: you can do the same.
- Once a forum grows so big that you feel interesting threads get pushed to page 2 (and thus ignored) too fast for most members to see it, that's when your boards will benefit from splitting a forum into two smaller ones.
- Developing your forum's community spirit also means encouraging your members to get to know each other better, to make friends, basically! You're unlikely to abandon a forum if it's a community you're an active part of and have people you consider to be friends in. Get them to post pictures of themselves, to describe where they live, to talk about their other hobbies, etc. You can't force people to make friends.... but you can certainly encourage it!
- Keep the number of mods proportionate to the number of members. There will always be you, the admin, and you will at most need one global mod in the early stages, as a second opinion can help. Do not have any more.
*Only promote people to modhood when they are needed and deserving of it. Don’t mod your friends, the first people to join, or new members. It cheapens the whole thing and you want to have a dedicated staff. Chances are moding your friends, first people to join, and members who recently signed up will be dedicated very little, not at all, or just not suited to be staff.
*Another no-no is not to pretend to have a huge, popular, famous forum. You don’t. Neither do I. Humility is everything at the start. It looks professional, and is hence more likely to attract members.
Follow this advice, and you are likely to have a nice forum with at least a few returning members. When your forum needs to grow and expand, you will be experienced enough to know it. Until then, the rule of thumb is KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!!
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Affiliation Tips:
What is an affiliate?
An affiliate is a square graphics mini-banner of the size of 91 By 31 (most of the time). If you have one you can work out deals so that other people have your mini-banner on their forum & you have theirs on your forum. Many people will have between 5 to up to 50 affiliates.
What size should my affiliate be?
88 by 31 pixel is the most common size, but there is the rare ugly one that's larger.
What size of sites should I affiliate with?
This is a mistake that many people do. They think they should affiliate with huge boards.
Make sure the other forums member count is about the same. Many people think that it's best to affiliate with bigger forums, but that is not always good because a big forum is bigger probably because it's better and they may take the little amount of active members you have.
What kind of forum should I affiliate with?
It should have the same type of theme. Not totally the same, but sort of. For example if you've got a Nascar Forum then it's probably a good idea to affiliate with a Low-rider forum, and other types of car related forums. This way there is more of a chance that the person who enters will be already interested.
How many total affiliates should I have?
Anymore than 15 affiliates just looks wrong & obsessive.
Is there a downfall of affiliates?
Yes, and it's a heavy cost.
Affiliates mess with the look of you're board. Sometimes just when you got an amazingly great design on your forum, then you affiliate with someone and their mini-banner flashes in Neon rainbow. This is too distracting to your members.
Another issue is that it will slow down the page load of your forum.
Search Engine Tips:
Get listed in Yahoo search
Since yahoo is one of the most Popular Search Engine. So it can bring a high traffic to your site. To get listed in yahoo search you have to add your URL to Yahoo search. Yahoo has both paid and free submission option you may choose any one according to your requirements. You may even add you XML feed and all URLs using a text file. Generally they take 6 week to get listed but it varies depending on your site. Initially yahoo will crawl only few pages of your site then you will find that more pages are getting listed in yahoo. If you site is in yahoo directory then you need not to do all this things. To add URL You must have a Yahoo ID.
Meta Tags
Though most largest search engines do not 'spider' the keyword Meta Tags on your page, and in some cases ignore these completely, the use of Meta Tags on your page still serves an important purpose. There are literally hundreds, even thousands of smaller search engines scattered all across the Internet. Whilst the bigger engines tend to 'spider' whole pages instead and obtain their results from that, these smaller search engines don't have as much physical space to work with and must do things differently. It is in these particular engines you will find that Meta Tags are still very important.
Before Submitting Your Site
Before submitting your webpages you must check all the link pages thoroughly one by one. Do not forget that they should be judged not only by you and your visitors but by number of professional Web site reviewers once you submit them to Web Directories. Check them online after you check them as your local files on your computer. Spend time browsing and clicking on every link on every page. Double check if all the images are loading and how long it takes to load the pages. Use different browsers to see how compatible they are with old and new versions.
Tell your friends to browse your site and give you their feedback how easy it is to navigate, how easy they understand it's content, how easy it is to find a product or how easy to order and the overall performance of your site.
You should check your pages on different computer monitor resolutions. They must look good at 480X640 as much as with 600X800 resolution and even in 1024X768 resolution. Select different font sizes on your browser and make sure your page looks good with any of them. You may add a line mentioned best viewed in 1024X768 resolution.
