Hi there Im so glad i forund you videos about starting a website lisa ty for that anyways my problem is this my husband is a member of a forums for his RC car hobby now we decided to start a forums w/ads to generate some cash flow so we went with GODADDY got a domain name Web hosting search engine visability package Now i tried there free forums and didnt like what we saw so vBulletin had the features we needed so we leased a lic, to try it out our problem is once we downloaded it to our computer we have to edit it as there ins tell us to WOW is this edit thing frustrating us my question is do we (A) pay for phone support to have them guide us thru it ? or (b) is there some easy step by step instructions on this edit part so we can upload it ? we really would appreciate the help asap as we want to get this up and running


also one feature im looking for is the paid subcriptions I know VB has them is there others that do as well ?

is GODADDY vb friendly ???

Welcome to the forum. This is a great place to learn and share.

I do not want to discourage you, but I am sure you want honest help and there are a few things in your post that indicate you may be in for some frustrating times without a little rethinking.

Working from the end back to the beginning, you certainly need to rethink the idea of requiring paid subscriptions to your forum. The only way you can do that is to have a lot of really superior or unique information. Very few forums can ever qualify for that.

Second, you are attempting a very difficult thing to get a forum off the ground without a solid site to lead people into your forum. Even Lisa folded more than one forum for that reason. Then she built 2CreateAWebsite.com to over 1,000 daily visitors before starting this forum and used it to help feed the first members here. That is how I got involved.

You may be able to pull it off, but you need to think about how you are going to get enough people to quickly join and post to have enough interesting content to hold new visitors? And it takes a lot of members. Today this forum shows: "Members: 22,304, Active Members: 781 ." In other words you will generally need to get 30 or 40 members to get one who will post, and remember only a few of those who visit the site will even register at all. In short, forums are a lot more difficult to start than most people envision.

You may be better off setting up a static site on your domain with good content about RC cars, learn a little about html and css so you can set it up and maintain it, and then start your forum after you get some significant traffic to the site.

This may not be what you were wanting to hear, but working on line does require actual work. If you read Lisa's sites and watch her videos carefully you will learn what it takes. She is dead on right and offers as good information as you will find online. It is great work but you do have to put in some time to learn and develop your skills.

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Good Success!

Douglas County Master Gardeners
"We don't always get what we want, but we always get what we expect."