As if I didn’t have enough to-do I’ve gone ahead and setup some discussion forums.
I felt that running the forums under the current domain of michaelfmcnamara.com felt a little conceded to say the least. I’m hoping to draw in some other folks to help foster “the community” and I didn’t want it directly associated with my name. So I went out and registered another domain and setup Simple Machines Forum software. I’ve setup a few discussion boards for now but I’m very open to adding additional boards if there’s enough interest.
http://forums.networkinfrastructure.info
I’m not exactly sure how successful this will be but I’m willing to give it a try and see what response (if any) I get from the general public. There isn’t a lot of bling to the site right now, just using the default theme with a few tweaks to help get SEO and RSS running cleanly.
I’ll probably try to develop a few FAQ for each board as a starting point.
Please feel free to let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Michael,
Congrats on getting the forums up and going. I checked them out, they look good. I’m curious about what you did for SEO, anything you care to share here?
Hi Mark,
I installed a few add-ons to the Simple Machines Forum installation to help improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of the site.
I installed Pretty URLs by Dannii and SMF Sitemap by SlammedDime and RSS Feed Icon by vbgamer45 along with Ad Management by jerm.
The ultimate success of any site these days relies on the ability to capitalize on Google and the other search engines on the Internet. While “word-of-mouth” is a great starting point folks can’t find your site if your not being indexed by the search bots. I also have an account on Google’s Webmaster Central where I can setup the sitemap and review any errors that Google might encounter indexing my site.
The ultimate determination of it’s success will be the content itself.
This blog is getting between 400 and 600 visits daily which is much more than I ever thought it would after almost 2 years now. Thankfully the ad revenue generated by the site covers the costs of hosting so there no outlay of money on my part to setup experiments such as the discussion forums.
Thanks for the comment!