The Guide to Selecting Boards for Your Forum

When you first start your forum there are many decisions to make. You have to decide on a name for your forum, a color scheme, and a theme. After you make those decisions, you must decide how many boards you will have on your forum and what those boards will be about. This decision is just as important as the previous ones you had to make about your forum. It can greatly effect how successful your site is.

You do not want to start with too many boards on your forum. When you have a lot of boards to post on they will look empty in the beginning. After all, at first it will only be you and maybe a few friends who are posting. If you only have five people posting, there is no need to have twenty discussion boards. When guests come to your board you want it to appear as if you have a very active forum, even if that is not the case.

Say you create one board for discussion about music, one board for discussion on movies, and one discussion board for television shows. A visitor may click on the movie board and see that only one discussion has been made that day. If they feel it is inactive, they will go to another forum. Instead, start with one board for those three areas of concentration. It is important to remember that you can always add more boards as your forum grows.

Another problem that some forums face is not creating enough boards on their forum. While this is less common, it can quickly turn members away from your forum just as having too many boards can. There are two reasons that people have to few boards.

The first is simply that you do not start with many boards in the beginning. If this is from lack of ideas there are a few boards you can create on your forum to make it look like you have more going on. Create an introduction board where new members can post and tell the other members who are they are. This board is a great way to welcome new members in and make your forum a little more active. Another board that you can add is a game board. There are so many different forum games that your members can play. Check my other articles for ideas.

The second reason that a forum may not have enough boards is that their forum has simply not grown as the number of members has grown. As I said before, you can always add new boards to your forum and it may be necessary as your forum becomes more active. If you have a general discussion board and there are fifty new topics being created every 30 minutes, it will be hard for members to keep up. Some threads will be pushed to the back, unanswered, and this will lead to upset members. Take a look at your most active board. Is it too active? Is there any way to split this board up into two different boards? Once our general discussion board became too active we realized that many members were posting movie reviews there. The answer to our problems was to create a new subboard that was only for movie reviews. We then had to discussion boards and more threads were being noticed.

So, how many boards should you start with? The honest truth is that there is no right or wrong answer. Every forum is different and will need a different amount of boards in the beginning. I have created an outline that you might want to use as a suggestion when decidig what boards are right for yourself. Keep in mind that this is only a suggestion and it might not work for ever person and every forum.

Introduction: This is a board where new members create a thread to introduce themselves. People who are already a member should say hello and make them feel welcome. This is very important for new boards. It gives people a chance to get to know each other.

Rules and FAQs: In the beginning you will not have many Frequently Asked Questions in your list, but still create a place for it. Also post your forum rules here. This ensures that everyone knows exactly what is expected of them on your forum.

General Discussion: This is a board where members can talk about anything and everything. It does not need to have anything to do with the theme of your forum. Often people try to break general discussion into several different boards. Start with one. As your forum grows and you see what your members are interested in, you will know how to break your general discussion board into new boards. You don't want to create a board for music videos only to have no one post in it because your members aren't interested in that.

1 or 2 Themed Discussion: These are boards that have something to do directly with the theme of your forum. If you have created a Harry Potter forum then you would have one or two boards to discuss Harry Potter. Make one of these a more generalized board where members can discuss any topics concerning your theme. For the other board you might consider making it more specific. Maybe you are only going to discuss Harry Potter Products in one board and the other board is for everything else related to Harry Potter.

1 or 2 Fun Boards: Members want to join a forum where the members are having fun. You will want to create one or two boards that are just for that. There are so many different things you can do for this and it just depends on what works best for your forum. Try creating a board where members can play forum games, or create a contest board and think of a couple of contests to start with. Another option is to create a role playing board, but this will take a lot of work and upkeep. It is best to start a board like this after your site has gained enough members to make it interesting.

When you first start your forum, you have so many ideas and plans for what you want the site to be. Write down all of your ideas, but you don't have to use them now. Let your forum develop over time. It will be much more successful if it grows with the members.