Full On Design

I love forums, they are a great way to communicate but I find that very often I get to a website’s forums and find it is about as interesting as paint drying. Below are some of the complaints I tend to have for the webmasters.

1. Your users are idiots

This is a common problem on support forums, where users will post the exactly same problem…several times (Sometimes you may even find it’s the same user). This is unbelievably infuriating because it shows the person who wants help, can’t be bothered to even do a quick search.

The best solution is to encourage user to check before they post (such as a simple search of previous posts, like on Digg). This will reduce the number of very similar posts.

2. You have too much choice

Keep your forum relevant to your website; I don’t want to go to a Surfing website and end up talking about Web Design. Try and limit yourself to around 2 to 4 forums with a maximum of 4 sub-forums. Otherwise you are overloading your users with choice.

3. You have no community

No one likes the feeling that they are talking to themselves, especially on forums. Make sure you (and everyone you know) use your forums, to make it feel more active.

Having an easily accessible “Recent posts” or “Active Topics” page will instantaneously give smaller forums a feeling of community.

4. Users don’t know how to reply

Users are silly folk, you could create an in dept tutorial on how to reply to a post, and they still would never be able to figure it out.

To avoid this problem, don’t make it difficult to reply to topics. The best technique is to have a quick reply box on the bottom of each thread’s page, which is clearly marked (If you can a nice arrow saying “Reply Here” will always help).

5. Your pages take too long to load

I have a slow internet connection, and the last thing I need is to be loading tones of unnecessary JavaScript or oversized images in a users signatures. The best solution is to be selective on the extensions you have on your forum and disallow users putting big images in their signatures (especially if they are hosted off site).

Take a look at Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding up Your Web Site page for tips on making your webpage’s faster.

6. You forum feels out of place

Make sure you have correctly integrated your forum into your website. Nothing is worse than seeing forums with a different design to the websites main site. Make sure the design on your forum is similar to your main website.

Also, make sure that is integrated within the website, no one likes signing up more than once for a single website.

7. Your forum is unnecessary

Ask yourself this, “How does the forum benefit my website?” if you are having problems answering that question is probably a good idea not to have a forum in the first place as it will just devaluing your website.