Adding a forum to a website? How??

asquiths_2

Hi all i hope i've posted this in the right place if not please feel free to move it.

My husband has started work self employed and we have just started a free trial website with vistaprint.

So far things seem to be going great but alot of potential clients are suggesting we should have a forum.

How would we create a forum? could we add a forum to the current website we have running?

Thanks in advance x

Jeff_Bridges_hair

http://www.forumotion.com/en/create-forum/

this should give you the basics

asquiths_2

Thanks for the quick reply.

Is there a way of adding this forum to the vistaprint website we have up and running?

xx

kwikbreaks

Whether or not you can add a forum depends on what facilities the hosting includes. Most forum scripts need php and mysql support. I took a look at Vistaprint and they don't seem to specify what they offer at all so the chances are that the answer is no.

That's not bad news really. A site needs a lot of traffic to make a forum worthwhile otherwise a vistor taking a look is likely to come away with a bad impression if the last post was a month ago. And an even worse impression if it is spam for a !!!!!! site because you gave up on moderating it when nobody posted for weeks.

GeoffX

I don't know what limitations Vistaprint place upon your website, but there are various free solutions for hosting forums, either on your own site or remotely. TheFreeCountry.com and its sister sites are useful places to start looking.

Remotely hosted:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/scripthosting/messageboards.shtml

On site:
http://www.thefreecountry.com/php/messageboards.shtml

The latter will generally place certain requirements on your website, for instance MySQL to host its database.

You could also look at Google Groups. Please don't use Facebook. Please...

Basil1234

the other way to do it is run a forum on a free site and on your site link to it with a clickable link. then the sql databases are not an issue as alot of hosts on certain set up do not allow access to sql databases as multiple sites setup thru a master sql and if that got broke all sites go down.

on i have used in the past for instant was http://www.setbb.com/ and they where ok and free to setup and use. otherwise you will need access to your server and sql database on your server. maybe worth asking if you hosting provider could set you one up as an alternative only takes about 5 mins once you know what your doing most servers have phpbb on them just need set them up.

rgannon4

You should install joomla which is an open source (Free) web solution which will allow you to install a forum quite easily without any programming knowledge.

Some webhosts such as heart internet provide 1 click joomla installation so you dont even have to istall that!.

Good Luck