Online Communities, Message Boards, Conference Area

A great way to improve your website is to add an online message board area, otherwise referred to as an online community. These will bring users back to your site over and over again, which ultimately will make the advertising on your site more effective.

Perhaps you wish to have support forums for your company's products. Or if your site is devoted to a special interest, like coin collecting, it would be nice to have a good-looking community area for other fans of coin collecting, who will enjoy visiting regularly to meet others with like-minded interests.

Over the years we have used several different programs. Some out there today are free, mostly ones that utilize Linux and PHP. We have always preferred reasonably-priced programs that include a useful base of customer support and steady stream of upgrades.

Our favorite program is VBulletin. Here is why we like it best:

• Easily customizable.
  Many of the free conferencing programs are very difficult to customize, and being able to establish your own look and feel is most important. Every aspect of the interface can be customized to appear the way you want.
• Capacity for an unlimited number of forum areas and posts.
  Many sites wish to keep a historical record of their discussions and posts.
• Email notification.
  When someone starts a topic or asks a question, they can be informed by email that there are replies. This is useful so people know immediately when their questions gets a response.
• Template driven interface.
  The board is composed of templates making customization easy.
• Includes popular community features.
  Users can use smileys and special signatures in their postings. Users can setup their own individual profiles with photos or avatars.

An example of a nicely done website that uses VBulletin is Family Tree DNA. Another good one is GeoBaby, which for parents in Hong Kong to discuss baby and parenting issues.

What do you need?

You need a webhost that has PHP and MySQL installed. Most offer these now. Just contact your webhost beforehand, and make sure that they recent versions installed, which are MySQL 3.23.33 and PHP 4.

If you are looking for a web host that has this, we can take care of you if you go to our Web Hosting area. Just click on our VBulletin banners on this page, and it will take you to their website. VBulletin has more information, as well as complete pricing information on their website.

Inexpensive and hassle-free, vBulletin is the ideal community solution for all medium-to-large sites.

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