5 Methods for a User Friendly Forum

[Shawn G]

Shawn G submitted a new Article:

5 Methods for a User Friendly Forum

5 Methods for a User Friendly Forum

A user friendly forum is crucial for having an active and successful forum community. You need to make sure your forum is as user friendly as it can be because the less friendly it is to visitors and members; the less likely they will want to be active on your forum. In this article, I will show you 5 methods which I think are a few of the most important ways to keep a forum user friendly. If you implement these methods on your forum, I feel that an active and successful forum community will be in your future.

Speed

Speed is important in this day and age because of how fast the internet is. In the old days of dialup, websites could get away with slow servers because most of the time, everyone had slow internet that took a while to load websites any ways. Nowadays, everyone has lightning fast internet speeds and they don't want to wait around for a website to load. Most of the time, a slow site is from servers that are hosting on free hosting services or over sellers. You often get what you pay for so if you have free hosting and the server is extremely slow, how can you even complain about it? I mean you are not losing any money because of it. You also need to take others things in account for slowness as well including third-party modifications that could be causing it or enabled AJAX or something like that which could be outputting issues on a user's end. When creating a forum and running one, you should always keep speed in mind and always look for ways to increase the server's speed even if it means upgrading to a VPS or dedicated server.

Boards

The boards play a big role in the forum being user friendly or not. If a guest visits your forum and sees a lot of categories and boards with a lot of inactive areas, they will likely not waste their time on your forum. The more boards you have, the more inactive your forum will look unless you are able to keep each board EXTREMELY active every day. I always suggest having fewer boards. Then you can have more posts in them and THAT will make the forum seem way more active. Plus it's confusing to have to go on a wild goose chase looking for the correct board to post it and if they have to scroll down too far, their heads may explode in the process. A new or not as active forum should have no more than 6 to 8 board's total (that the public can see). You also need to make sure your boards are well named and that they have a good description. Think as a guest looking for...

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