Transitioning to Wordpress.
This article was published on Nov 7 2007.
When building a website, the community aspect of it should be the last thing implemented.
I’ve heard from numerous people that any sort of community technology with in your project should be developed last, and only after there is a need for your audience to interact with each other. I always believed that if the content is excellent, you could start a community oriented website from the beginning and it would have no excuse to fail. I was wrong.
Earlier this year I developed a student website that focused on college life and taking the most out of it. At first I concentrated on creating a forum where all of the students would congregate and communicate with each other, sell their books and trade things they wanted within the campus. The idea is great, but very difficult when it comes to implementing a community in the beginning. After days and weeks of promoting the site on campus only 9 people signed up. I wasn’t about to quit, but I was forced to find a different way of creating this community.
At this point I had a static page that displayed the recent articles, RSS feeds, and links to other parts of my site. The page would be updated (by me)every time I had a new article and it would link to the forum post where it would be discussed. I had a great way of managing the content while focusing on the growth of my online community, what I thought was a win win situation.
Unfortunately, by posting all of my content on the forums, there was no way of classifying my content for others to quickly navigate from the main page. I also lacked interaction between the forum software and the static page, and all of the menial work had to be completed by me. It was a world of copy paste, copy paste.
At this point all I wanted to do was to ditch the forum and concentrate on a pseudo community using Wordpress. By switching over to wordpress I would get the opportunity to create a small community from loyal readers and have all of my content managed in one place. It wasn’t an easy decision, for I had spend more than 3 weeks developing this forum and making it perfect, I didn’t want to throw out something solid and complete.
Online communities take at least 2 to 3 years to mature.
While deciding what to do, I heard many web designers say that a forum takes approximately 2 years to mature compared to a smaller website. This was the trigger that made up my mind. Instead of waiting the year or more to develop my forum community, I can create the site and community using wordpress, and when that receives a greater following just open up the forums that I have completed. It makes complete sense to do this, and hopefully with this new wave of content that I have coming, it will spark conversation and interest to my site.
It took me 3 months and a big failure to stop and listen to others in the field. Creating, feeding, and maintaining forum communities is hardER work compared to managing a wordpress blog site. I am not saying building a forum from the start is absolutely wrong, but If you don’t have the resources and time commitment to invest in a forum community, build a wordpress site and when you receive the necessary amount of people offer them forums. Remember if you have forums and a wordpress site and your forums fail you still have a successfully website to concentrate on.
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