Big Boards, But not appealing
 

I have always thought that the most important thing to having a successful website was not only content, and something that people are interested in, but appealing to the eyes. As at first that is really all everyone sees anyway. First glance and a user decides if they are going to stay if or if they are going to leave.
Anyway, I was browsing big-boards, as of course I have aspirations to be there some day as well :) I found it rather interesting that most of the sites really weren't appealing at all. The sites seemed very amateur looking. No offense to the guys that made them as they are doing something right because they are huge sites.
I am just rather confused on how they have become so big, yet they are just not appealing to look at.

Some of it has to do with the fact that designers are becoming so simple minded. Everyone is going for the bright orange/blue/green gradiant look. It looks neet, but often times over done. Going back to the roots of web design, simple box and text designs often times work the best. Might not get huge props from the Photoshop gurus, but your members will love the simplicity.

You are absolutely right..........I believe one of the main key's to building your site, is YOU.........You should alway's be available, when possible. You should always welcome new people and when they make a post, no matter how silly, reply in a positive manner. You should'nt be to controlling and allow people to express themselve's, decently.........
With that being done, as people drift into your site, they will continue to come back. I believe that you can have the most sophisticated looking site on the net, but if you aren't there and you treat people like poo-poo, no one will come back.

My site has been up for a little over a year now, i have in the area of 700 members, and of those, 20 or so are now on everyday.........Not sure how appealing my site is to look at, but it is mine and i am pretty proud of er. I put alot of work into making it the way i think i would like a site to look, if that make's sense............

hotwheels

that makes sense, and I can appreciate a simple website. Easy to read and not get lost in it. Like this site, it is simple, but it looks like there was time put into it. I can appreciate that. I don't want to pick one out and talk about it but for example. If I go to one, it looks like it was slapped together in less then 5 minutes, and there are pop ups and ads everywhere. Even if they stayed with the default vBulletin theme and just changed the logo. That would be better. Maybe I just have a different taste then others.

Different taste is a great way to put it........especially if you know what it take's to build a site and make it function correctly. So when you do run across those site's, it is hard to understand how they have drawn such a huge membership........

I totally understand what you mean there.....

Another thing about a lot of the really big boards is that their content isn't all that hot either. It's a lot of dreck and unmoderated flaming, sex and juvenile humor.

It seems 'anything goes' is a good selling point for forums.

I suppose that is true as well. Although as soon as someone flames on my board I get about 15 PMs about the post. I wonder how the mods keep up with the site :)

Kewl...........sound's like my site.............It's unmoderated as far as having absolute control over speech......we also have a BUNCH of junenile humor, which help's people relax and not have to take the internet so seriously..........life is serious enough, why should a site be just as serious or even more so, as some are......

yeah, I think there has to be limits though. I think it will come to a point where its non stop all out war :)

A lot of it depends on the type of people that you attract to your site and the existing content that you then can encourage them to join in with.

For example, my site (up 3 years next week) has the following stats
Threads: 4,096
Posts: 52,657
Members: 340

Out of these 16,664 posts are in just 26 threads. I also regularly merge threads posted by my RSS bots into monthly threads.

I'd like it to be a big board, but it is more of a family. Very few of the users are active, and those that are either come for a few days then that is it, or they stick around for a good while and become part of the furniture.

Anything goes on most of the site, and in some areas more than others, but it still keeps being smooth and on the whole my members like it. My staff and myself (me, one other admin and a mod) know most of the members, and the two admins (me and my co-admin) try and personally welcome each new member.

I think it all comes down to limits and what you believe in. If you are strict with rules then you get people pushing them all the time. If you have rules, but work on a respect basis, then most people will respect it as they know that they will be the one who spoils it for everyone else. If you don't have any rules then you have anarchy.

Going back to my site (sorry it makes good examples for all the size of it) in my site rules, which are actually quite lengthy, we have two comments that work very well. The first regarding the warning system that we have in place (now infractions, previously has been AWS, a thread in the staff forum, and way back when we ran IPB - their warning system) says:In total 15 warnings have been given out in 3 years. a few bans have taken place, but mainly because they were inactivated acounts from adult domain names.

The other one says:and we have never had a problem with bad language. Occassionally profanity erupts, but mainly in our rants and raves area, or used as an infrequent method of expression. No-one pushes it though as they like the right to be able to use profantity from time to time.


Styles are not really important, the most important thing should be useability, and content. If you have a good established user base and a good topic, then you should become quite big quite quickly, otherwise just plod along and enjoy the ride. You never know when something will happen and you will have an explosion in growth. After all, think of the money your saving if you only have a small site ;) Theres a big difference between being on shared hosting using 1 or 2GB bandwidth a month, to having a massive dedicated server using at least that much a day.

I wonder how many of those boards are fraudulant. I can't see a handful of members making millions of posts. In fact, I think it's impossible. My board has grown honestly and earned all of it's notoriety from not tweaking a thing. One of my competitor's boards is far less honest in many areas.

I think the idea of being comfortable at a big board is to be there before the rush - in other words, you're there before it gets unbelievable huge. That way, you're comfortable and know your way around.

It's tough joining a forum with hundreds of thousands of members and trying to settle in - takes a long time, unless you're a complete forum junkie like me.

I tend to steer clear of forums that don't have a single specific idea.

I think what happens is once a board gets really busy and starts to cost a lot to run. They look at ways also to save on bandwidth. Like using a very plain fast loading skin to speed browsing up for members and to cut costs on bills also because the plain fast loading skins means less images need be loaded which saves on bandwidth (saves cash).

i noticed the same thing a while ago when I was browsing quite a few TOP SITES for ideas. But what caught my eye was the trash and rubbish threads posted on some of them. Some even looked like a ton of content had been mass copied to them over a long time.

I think many of those huge boards that look poorly designed look like this because 1. they were started some time ago (when the designs were different) and 2. the owners don't know or don't care about the design. I agree that some members don't care about how the forums look, but I can't sleep at night if I have something not showing nice or the design is poor. But I am mainly a designer and then a content writer and for a small forum as mine every detail counts.

I would like to be one of those bug-boards one day, but the looks will remain important, as the quality of content I realy care about. When you keep an eye on the quality of the posts and enforce it, it's harder to get to amazing postcounts, but in the end this is not what I want. I want to give my members a friendly place to stay and good content to help them.