Integration Question

[j~scoot]

We have a motor scooter website and forum.

Our forum has been around for a while and has a lot of valuable information that people find when searching about their scooter. We also have a store. I think we could improve sales if our store and forum were a little more integrated, or if they at least shared the same header with the same menu so that it was easy to go back an forth. I fear that many users come to our forum and don't even know we have a parts store.

I'm looking for suggestions on this or examples if anyone has done something similar.

Here are the links:

Store:
http://www.provoscooter.com/

Forum:
http://www.provoscooter.com/forum/index.php

[UKBusinessLive]

I use an external login box on my main site www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk

its about half way down on the right looks like this



Not sure where i got the code from but its so easy to do, It won't come in a frame like my site as thats just customised, but it should be easy for you to add it to your site in a frame of some sort.

I added a picture, the option to sign in, and also a link to the register page, I find that a lot of people are clicking on the frame to take a look at the forums and then signing up, but its early days yet and i've not promoted the site as much.

I'll grab the code from my home page and stick it here so that you can get a rough idea of whats needed

Bear with me

here we are, Just change the red details for your own

<a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum"><img src="http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr114/ukbusinesslive/Forum-pic.jpg" border="0" ></a>
<a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/register.php">Register Free NOW!</a>
<form action="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/login.php?do=login" target="_new" method="post" onsubmit="md5hash(vb_login_password, vb_login_md5password, vb_login_md5password_utf, $show[nopasswordempty])">
  	  <input type="hidden" name="do" value="login" />
  	  <input type="hidden" name="url" value="/forum" />
  	  <input type="hidden" name="vb_login_md5password" />
  	  <input type="hidden" name="vb_login_md5password_utf" />
  	  <input type="hidden" name="s" value="$session[sessionhash]" />
  	  <label>Username:<input name="vb_login_username" type="text" id="login" tabindex="1" class="bginput" accesskey="u"/></label>
  	  <label>Password:<input name="vb_login_password" type="password" id="password" tabindex="1" class="bginput" /></label>
      <label>Remember me?<input type="checkbox" name="cookieuser" value="1" id="cb_cookieuser" tabindex="1" /></label>
  	  <input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" tabindex="1" value="Login" accesskey="s" class="button" />
       
</form>

If you want to try it before adding it into a frame just copy your edited code into notepad and save it to your desktop as forum.html or something similar, then you'll be able to test it by simply clicking on it

Hope that helps

[j~scoot]

Thanks for the info! We'll probably end up using that code.

That takes care of getting people from the store to the forum, but i guess my main concern is the other direction. How to get people that enter your site through the forum to know that the forum is part of a larger site, especially a store.

[UKBusinessLive]

Originally Posted by j~scoot

Thanks for the info! We'll probably end up using that code.

That takes care of getting people from the store to the forum, but i guess my main concern is the other direction. How to get people that enter your site through the forum to know that the forum is part of a larger site, especially a store.

Add a menu bar with links to the store, Add a Links Section in your forum, make some banners and add them to the header/footer

Theres so much, you could start with a competition and for the answers members will need to visit the store, make an RSS feed from the store to your forums, listing all the latest items etc.

If you don't want to clam up your forum with loads of links, you could have them all on one line with my mod here https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=200283

You can simply add different Urls of your store site to let members chose which page they want to go to



These are just a few ideas which i use on my forum/store, i'm sure there are many more fresh ideas to get two sites more closely connected.

Good Luck

[ProSkinner.com]

Integrating the header and footer will bring out the navigation links and make it much easier to get around your site.

It's fairly easy to do this. Copy your homepage header and footer HTML code and insert it into the respective vBulletin "header" and "footer" templates in your Style Manager.