Forum boards contribute to the overall layout and design of your forum, and thus, decide its longevity. There should be serious attention to detail regarding all aspects of your forum's appearance. Most of the time Internet marketers and other administrators that make a forum structure its layout according to their forum posts, but totally forget about how different structures would lead to a tailor-made forum that is ideal for your audience.
Following are some tips on how to manage your forum boards so that the forum may not look cluttered. An uncluttered forum is one which is easy to navigate through.
1. Categorizing:
Imagine if all the entries of a forum would be uncategorized. In such a forum, it would become so difficult to even access the homepage as all the content would be thrown out in front. That is why categorizing forum posts are such an important and down to earth procedure. The key here is to make simple and logically correct categories that are easy to find. Care must be taken so that the categories are diverse enough so that sub-categories can be made in the future.
The most common mistakes that most Webmasters does are:
They assign all the posts to "general" category:
What that does is it makes the forum tedious to navigate as all the entries are put in the general category, rather than assigning them to their appropriate sections.
The categories are not diverse enough:
This is an amateur mistake that generally goes away with experience. Here, the webmasters make categories related to individual posts. By not being pro-active and not having an idea of the long term direction of the forum, even the categories become cluttered and, thus, are hard to navigate.
2. Uncluttered forum:
The most complicated and hard to navigate forums are quite often not the most informative and user- friendly. Just like having a pile of books around your room does not make you any more clever, and you basically end up having an untidy room, likewise, having a forum with too many forum boards will make the experience that much tougher for the visitor. Who wants to navigate through 50+ forum topics and nine different forum boards to get what they were looking for? One way to have a clean little simple forum is to make new forum boards only as a last resort; ideally there should be only one forum board which we will refer to as the main forum board.
This should contain all the different forum topics like a book. You see, a book also has just one contents page. Is it not tedious when we come across books that had previously compiled separately and are now merged into one; they too have more than one contents page. Although a forum is much easier and carefree to navigate, but we do not recommend having more than three or four forum boards for your website; whether it be Internet marketing or general purpose.
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