I want to reach out for education on websites

[stu300asu]

Hello All,
I want to thank everyone for welcoming me in to this great community. I will get right down to it I need HELP!!! Bottom line I have such a passion for my idea for my site but I have met with designer after designer and I have received estimates from 250 to 6000 to get my site up and running. I am completely lost on how I can turn my idea into a reality and I am turning to this great community for help with this. I am basically looking to start a forum community where everyone can join for free like this one but also want to host an hour talk show on the site maybe 3 days per week. I'm coming to everyone with open arms because this is such a great community please help me make this happen. I just want to know what is involved from top to bottom, what to expect and how to go about getting this going. Again thank for welcoming me into this forum and I am really looking forward to talking with everyone.

Make It A Great Day,

Nick

[ssmorgan]

Hi Nick,

First, welcome to Website Babble. We're glad you've joined us.

Creating an online community (or an active forum) requires quite a bit of consistent/steady traffic. The question of creating a forum has popped up in Website Babble a few times, and the general consensus is to hold off on launching the forum until you have a large amount of steady traffic visiting your website.

It sounds like you're very passionate about your topic, which is awesome. I think it would be a good idea to create a website about your topic first, and then capitalize on the traffic and build your community around the traffic coming from your site.

Lisa (and others) has more insight about this topic, and I am sure she (and others) will chime in soon.

Again, welcome to Website Babble.

Sherif

[lisa]

Welcome Nick!

I agree with Sherif. I tried to launch a forum numerous times when I first started. I failed each time because I had no traffic. You first need to build a site that can generate traffic and then launch a forum.

Let's say you wanted to build a community for teens to chat. It would make sense to build a content/information site with articles dedicated to teens. Perhaps you'd have articles on self esteem, peer pressure, etc. The reason being is that it's much easier to get free search engine traffic to your site through a content site than a forum. So you would use that traffic to promote your forum and encourage activity.

I use my site 2createawebsite.com to promote this forum and that's how 90% of the people find it. But 2create had thousands of hits per day before I even launched websitebabble.com

Many people put the cart before the horse. And starting a forum when you're brand new is definitely the cart in this scenario. First, build a content-rich site on the topic you're interested in then read up on search engine optimization (How to make your pages rank high in the engines). www.selfpromotion.com is a great place to start.

Hope that helps!

[Rob]

I agree with both Sheriff and Lisa but disagree at the same time,

I agree when saying that if you are building a forum as an attachment to content based site of your personal interests is very difficult and time consuming effort wise.

However if you are building a forum primarily as your site too I think you can gain much attention and traffic by concentrating on just your forums I know quite a few stand-a-lone forum orientated sites that gain much profits.

You might want to take a look at IPB its definitely the best solution if you want to later on incorporate other things into your forums to make it just a little more exciting such as a gallery, games, shout board, seo management. I could go on.