The Internet is a highly active and dynamic ecosystem. It is all about sharing information and communicating with one another. The Internet has made the whole a huge society. People are able to share their thoughts on specific topics that they are interested in. People are also able to learn more about one another. The Internet is an essential communication tool and we should incorporate this basic fact in the development and design process of our website. If we believe that we can establish a strong community around our topic, brand or product; it is a good idea to incorporate a web forum in our website.
By adding web forum in our website, we should have a sticky web presence. Many people will continue to visit our website to check posts and replies in our forum. This will increase the traffic to our website and we will be able to enhance our overall brands. It is clear that forums are one of the good things that we should add to our website. We will be able to achieve many things, not only distributing our own information, but also encouraging users to distribute their own information among themselves. Web forum can become a dynamic community that people love to visit every day.
Other than with social media, many companies also use web forums to have a more controllable platform to stay in touch with their customers and visitors. The overall registration process should be easy to do and they only need to provide their username, password and email address. Additional information and survey questions should be optional. Our web forums should be consisted of different categories that are related to our own topics. However, we should know that it is better to have fewer, but more active categories; than many categories that are barely opened by users.
We should discuss with our web designers and developers on how to implement web forums in our website. It would be much faster and easier to use available web forum engines, both the commercial and free versions. Some free web forum engines are already comprehensive enough with so many features that users can use. Regardless of the web forum engine that we use, it is important that it works well with our main website. A web forum can be directly incorporated into our main website or it could be placed in a sub-domain. If our main website platform doesn’t allow smooth integration of 3rd party web forum engine, then it is much easier to put the forum in a separate sub-domain.
When improving our website, it is also important to upgrade the web forum engine. This will ensure that our website is fully functional and capable of serving different purposes, depending on our users’ requirements. We should be aware that web forum can be a complex environment once thousands of people join it. We should make sure that the interaction in the forum stays acceptable and relevant to the main topic of our websites.