I was recently asked about the importance of creating a portal in addition to an already successful forum. The concern that was shared had to do with the possibility of the new portal distracting users or taking them away from the community. While I can understand the concern, I feel confident in saying that the upside much outweighs any possible downside. Let me explain…
The advantages of having a portal in addition to your forum are huge. It doesn’t make a difference if your forum is one day old and without members or 2 years old with 25,000 members.
The benefits are as follows:
- It provides you with a platform to build content your users will enjoy
- It will get you in to more CPM networks
- CPC ads perform better on “content” pages, so it will increase earnings
- Can be a great help in the SEO game when targetting certain keywords with the content
- It shows the community you are working to “improve” their user experience
- It separates you from the forum only crowd and provides an increased perceived value
This is a short list, but I think there are even more reasons that you could think of as to how this will benefit your community, your earnings, and the overall health of your site. If you are serious about building something “special”, then don’t wait. Get your portal in the works now!
Might want to make it clear that by portal you are not necessarily talking about something like vBadvanced that just simply takes your forum and puts it on one page.
It is a good idea to build a “portal” with different content. If your subject is cars you may want to present news on the content page or build a database or articles on the content page. Basically I think Lee is saying to build content outside your forum.
I know most don’t agree but I think NO portal is best. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have articles and other content. It just means you shouldn’t make it your front page UNLESS your very good at adding interesting content to that front page on a regular basis.
Portals get in the way of what users are really after which is the forum.
I think you should go in stages unless as stated before you just love to write or have access to a lot of unique and interesting content.
1. Start your forum and grow it.
2. Add a articles tab or some way to navigate to a special area for articles. This gives you the SEO benefits but lets the users find what they want… the forum!
3. Create a custom vbulletin index page that pulls in both articles and forum content.
That’s what I’m doing anyways.
Not trying to be rude or anything Nathan, but I trust Lee’s opinions a bit more.
Why?
He pulls in 5 grand a day.
Do you know for a three person home in the USA, a combined income of less than $16,600 is considered poverty? Also that 13% of Americans live in poverty?
Lee makes in week what most families struggle for a whole year to earn.
Just a different point of view. Lee has the resources to make good portal pages unlike most people who run a forum.
I just hate the typical “in the way” portal page.
You shouldn’t judge someone’s opinion by how much money they make.
I also agree with Nathan’s statement about not liking the typical “in the way” portal page. I am talking about a complete site, not just a homepage.
Agree with Lee, I am all for a front page as long as there is something worthwhile on it, if you are just going to pull out latest threads from your forum then its pretty useless.
I think it’s a terrific idea to have content that complements a forum. It doesn’t have to be a “portal” per se…it could be a blog or a wiki or just something else that provides value to the community. In many cases it’s the presence and popularity of a blog that spawns a successful forum (StevePavlina.com is a recent example).
I think one of the few ways it could hurt a site is if the portal/blog/wiki hides the forum in some way from casual visitors. But I would assume that if someone sees an unusually high bounce rate off their main page, they would re-design it so it’s both valuable in terms of content and also pointing visitors to the forum.
Once again… I know I’m out numbered here and I’m not saying it’s the only way to do things. I just know when I visit a website, any website, I want to get to the content I came for.
Do you have some examples of “good” portals?
I have always been impressed by bigblueball.com the portal is made from vbadvanced.
I like a good portal page. It’s more inviting to the common user. If it’s just a forum listing, the common user feels overwhelmed at times.
I use my wife as a “case study”. She’s not a forum “veteran”. She tends to join up sites that have portal pages.
“Do you have some examples of “good” portals?” - Mickey
YES!
http://www.huntingnet.com
@nathan,
tx for your suggestion.
That’s indeed a nice example (althought hunting ain’t my cup of tea)
That is a nice portal page…a bit overwhelming though in terms of information offered.
We have a portal now:
http://www.notebookforums.com/
We didn’t up until a couple of months ago. We had to in order to get exclusive ad representation (among other reasons listed below). Large advertisers simply don’t want standard forums…
MOST people come to the site off search engines, so they don’t see the portal page. We set it so members can choose in their profile if they go to the forum index upon arriving at the notebookforums.com URL, so they can bypass the page.
We designed it so that we could help people get where they needed to go easily if they hadn’t visited the site before (we are still tweaking - I feel like we have a lot of work to do still). It used to be when you arrived at the forum index, there was an overwhelming amout of forums and millions of posts. Where do you start? It overwhelmed me, even.
Of course, old members don’t need this page, but our goal is to make sure that people who haven’t been with us for a while are comfortable getting whatever information they need.
I will say that advertisers (big ones - Dell, Alienware, etc.) have responded VERY favorably to a standard homepage design. For what that’s worth to you…
Laura