Website. Forum

[Flametongue]

What does it take to create a good decent website and a forum like "filesharing talk". Does it take alot of work and what type of software do you need. Can you do it on your own simple computer or do you need a state of the art one with lots of features?

Cheers

[zacspeed]

Leave it to the experts dude!




(anyone know any experts!)
:huh:

[Flametongue]

i c I guess its a complicated task

[sameer0807]

i c I guess its a complicated task
not really.

What are you looking for? I mean what kind of forums?

[Flametongue]

similar to this kind of forum

[sArA]

First you need the board software such as VB or Invision.....and a server.

Oh....and you a topic people are interested in and members to create a community.

Something to get traffic through your site too....I don't have a clue how, but it is something to do with google, and word of mouth...

[Peerzy]

The google thing is all to do with Meta tags if i remember. Opening up this websites Page source it shows;


<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.0.3" />
<meta name="keywords" content="filesharingtalk, kazaa, kazaa lite, emule, newsgroups, IRC, file sharing, forum, file sharing forum, bittorrent" />
<meta name="description" content="Filesharingtalk.com - File sharing forum" />

So if i searched for IRC and we are the 17th biggest website (traffic wise) that has IRC in our meta tags, on google the 17th link would be us. The more you put in there the more chance you hve of climbing up the google ladder.

[Illuminati]

First you need the board software such as VB or Invision.....and a server.

Oh....and you a topic people are interested in and members to create a community.

Something to get traffic through your site too....I don't have a clue how, but it is something to do with google, and word of mouth...

Pretty much explains it AFAIK :)

Although phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com) may be a better alternative - For one thing, it's free (unlike vB or IPB) but also it's fairly easy to modify the code to your requirements. However, make sure your server has the stuff that the phpBB site says you require - It rules Geocities out but you can get fairly decent free webhosts who'll provide the stuff. :)

And like Sara says, the main thing you need is a purpose. No-one's going to come to a forum if there's nothing to stand out about it. Make sure you know what you're creating a forum for and stick to realistic proportions - Having a place for your friends to chat is enough, but don't expect more than that. Course if you have a particular topic for a site/website, remember to submit it to the search engines (especially Google!) so people can see it.

Hope we've all helped :)

[Flametongue]

lol boy oh boy thats too much. damn it. Anyway cheers for the info

[rookiecrd1]

Creating a forum isn't very hard. Getting people to post and come back is the hard part. Starting a forum from scratch is not easy. You need a good topic that you are interested in as well as something unique that other sites don't offer.

As for meta tags, google does not use metatags. They use spiders that crawl the content of a site.

VB software is $160 for a lifetime license. IPB, phpbb, etc are all free scripts that some servers already have installed. You will have to pay for hosting which to start won't be much but if your forum grows, this can take its toll.

I run several forums myself, this being the largest, and most fun :)
Brian