FreeForums.org Knowledge Base

Setting up your forum is one of the most important steps. No matter how good your promotion techniques are, if you don't have a good forum no one will join. Before you launch your forum lets look at a few important ideas:

 Set your appearance
Whether you like it or not, people will judge your forum based off how it looks. It's important to have a nice, clean style, in addition to a unique logo.

Keep your forum focused
Too many people think that if they make their forum cover every topic imaginable that they will attract more visitors since they will inevitably be interested in at least one of those topics. It is a good strategy but it has a few flaws. What makes someone visit and then join a forum in the first place?
        1. Subject(s) that interest them and
        2. an Active Community
Making a forum that has 12 different categories and 7 forums in each one of those categories may sound like a good idea because while this certainly covers a broad array of subjects it also makes your forum look inactive which will turn people away. What we suggest is having a fairly small forum that focuses primarily on 1-3 subjects and then expand from there if the need from your users arises. Empty forums are an unattractive aspect of a forum and could make people click the back button of the browser instead of registering.

Actually have content
You never want an empty forum. In addition to a rules thread, you want to make sure that every forum you made has "starter threads." These starter threads contain relevant content about the topic of that forum. They can be outside sources (ie. current news) or created by yourself. Members like quality content so create as much as possible.

Once you have your forum looking nice, and with content, it's time to launch!