Jackie2006 — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 05:48:10 +0000

Megan thanks for showing your interest. And I too feel that forums are the best place to interact with group of people. Yeh, at 1st she thought of to start a particular popular topic but later she changed her mind, keeping in mind the marketing aspect of her site. She thought if she starts with few categories rather than one then it will help in marketing part. But here’s also I am getting very little room for marketing. And for that she has to do hard work. Thanks for referring the CMS, I will definitely forward to her.

Btw, do you think that’s the right way to present topic/discussion, the way she presented in her site?

Thanks once again

Megan — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:16:27 +0000

Top discussions about what? Is there a topic focus here at all? It's kind of risky to do a really general topic site. It would be a good idea to concentrate on one topic for now and when the site becomes more popular more topics could be added.

There are a couple of optoins for this. There are forums, blogs, or other content management systems that could handle this. One difference is that forums put more control in the hands of the users. They can start topics (unless you don't give them permission to, which would be weird). Blogs and other CMS's put ore control in your hands. So you control what is being discussed. I also find that forums encourage more ongoing discussion and interaction. In blogs and cms's people tend to post one comment and don't come back to read other responses. They usually don't respond to otehr commenters either, while in forums there is more of an active exchange.

The "other CMS" that I'm referring to here would be something like drupal. There's a comment system built-in, so you could simply create a page and turn the comments on. People would then respond in the comments. Drupal also has a forum module, so you could use both areas together.

Hope that helps!