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The Importance of Having a Unique Forum Design
The #1 thing that will cause your forum to fail is having a poor design. This is the general consensus, and I’m just reinforcing - it’s true. It has been said that internet users will determine if they’ll stay on or leave your site in less than a second. Because of this, it is increasingly important to have a high-quality and user-friendly design. If you don’t make an impression within the first few seconds you’ve lost that user forever. If your potential members hear fantastic things about your site, it doesn’t matter whatsoever if your site’s look simply, well, sucks. The following are a few basic things that should be considered when thinking about the layout and look of your forum:
General Design
- The actual look, feel, and design of your forum should look clean and professional. Make the look something a large number of users will enjoy instead of the minority. There isn’t anything specific I’d like to pinpoint in regard to this design that isn’t otherwise covered in this post, but overall the general colors and layout of your forum are very important - perhaps the most important. The layout has to be easy to navigate and not straining on the eyes.
Clutter
- Having unnecessary banners and snippets of information might be useful, but it makes your site look bad. This is simply a fact. The cleaner and clearer the site, the more user friendly it will be. Users like designs that are simple. Every additional link, image, and advertisement you have is something that has potential to annoy your user. This is why I discourage the use of large signatures and signatures that have images in them: placing images in signatures litter your forum with unnecessary and distracting images that may upset may potential (and existing) users.
Advertisements
- No one likes ads, but they’re oftentimes necessary to run the site or to make a profit. However, from a user’s point-of-view, the fewer advertisements the better. Moreover, ads should be integrated, yet not intrusive. This is a difficult combination. You want the ads to be effective and get a decent CTR, but you don’t want the users to be significantly distracted or annoyed by them. You want the primary focus of your forum to be on the content posted and on user posting new, additional content. I’ll be making a more detailed post in a few days about the dos and don’ts of advertising on a forum.
But what kind of theme should you get? Should you use a free theme, buy one, make design your own, or purchase an exclusive one? Good themes are rarely free and themes won’t make themselves.
Scratch the Default Theme
While the default themes of most forum software companies are actually good, the fact that every user who uses the software has access to it should be a warning. There are tens of thousands of forums (if not more) on the internet today, and each and every one of those at one point was using a default theme. It’s likely there are still thens of thousands that currently use it today. Using a default theme does nothing to brand your site or make it stand out. It confines you; it makes your forum just another forum. Chances are that more than 50% of users have seen the theme before. This can confuse the users. Moreover, while a default theme is typically well designed, they’re still a long way from fantastic.
Stock and Paid Themes: You’re Getting Warmer
The next step up the totem pole of style is to use a free stock template or buy a better stock skin. While this is certainly better than using the default, it’s still not good enough if you’re serious about being successful. It works for a few, but all the major successful forums are using custom themes or modified default ones. Stock templates make your site look better, but not quite unique. If it’s available elsewhere, chances are it’s used elsewhere. If the theme is used elsewhere, that means users may have seen it elsewhere; if it’s been seen elsewhere, users get confused and annoyed. If you must use a stock template I strongly suggest you customize it to your site; change the colors, give it a custom header, new icons, and other things to make your site different from the original.
Get a Customized Unique Theme
I honestly believe the best thing you can do for your discussion board is to purchase a custom theme. Ideally, if you’re both a good designer and coder, you could do this yourself. However, this isn’t practical for many forum administrators. Usually you can get a high quality, custom theme for under $300. I’ve paid around $200 for mine and am quite satisfied. I don’t recommend you ever pay more than $500 for a theme, unless, of course, you can afford it and think it’s worth it. See my recommended page for some good designers and coders.
Blog Posting - How Much Is Too Much?
If you’re like most passionate bloggers, you probably post once a day, or more. You’ve probably even been told that posting at least daily will help create loyal readers. Some prominent bloggers even post three to four times a day. While this strategy does work for many larger bloggers with huge subscriber bases, it typically doesn’t work, especially for a beginning blogger. Creating a loyal reader base is how to make a blog successful. Readers who visit the site daily and comment on your blog build it, the same goes for RSS subscribers. For this reason, you want to do everything in your power to make sure your readers return; this includes not overwhelming with too many posts, which posting daily often does. If you post frequently, readers may simply get tired of reading your posts. Not only is reading time consuming, but chances are if a reader subscribes to your blog, they probably subscribed to a few other blogs as well. If these other blogs post daily, you can see how this can get quite tiring for the blog visitor. If a reader subscribes to three blogs that post twice a day, that’s six posts to read every day. Moreover, the daily RSS email reminders (if they subscribed via email) can litter their inbox and become annoying.
While this isn’t always the case, typically daily posting are of lower quality. Oftentimes these posts are either poorly constructed or republished information. Instead of focusing on how fast you post, focus on the quality of the articles. Content is king; not the amount in this case, but the quality of it. It’s better to have one high quality article than five poor quality ones. The sooner the blogging community realizes this, the better.
I suggest posting two to four times a week, instead of posting six to twelve (or more). If you could pick a consistent number, pick three posts/week. Doing this gives readers time to read your articles without feeling overwhelmed. Moreover, it lets you focus on making high quality content and gives you plenty of time to do so.
Now, there are some exceptions to this posts. For example, if you blog about something related to news, it wouldn’t make sense to only post two days after the facts. For real-life, time-essential blogs or posts posts as soon as possible.