Creating a website/forum

Megahurtz400 · 30 Jul 2019 at 22:50

Hey all,

I’m looking to create a website/blog/forum for a certain niche (not pc related, don’t worry mods!

), and not having done anything similar (apart from creating a pretty successful Shopify store for work) since I was about 15 years old, I’m a little bit lost!

I’ve purchased a few domains, am I right in thinking the next step is getting a webhost and installed a “forum software” like phpbb or similar onto said website and linking the domain?

I slowly working my way through Codecademys web development course, but can remember installing a forum on a webhost many many years ago without any real knowledge but my brain is slowly than it was 15 years ago

Any advice or links to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated

Lakeland · 30 Jul 2019 at 23:03

You need a database too, if you have a decent web host it’s probably included.

Forums are pretty much dead though, are you sure you want to?

andy_mk3 · 30 Jul 2019 at 23:05

Get some hosting from Krystal, dirt cheap and they're awesome. Their cpanel has site installer software which will take you through a wizard to install something like phpbb which takes a lot of work out of the process.

Steveocee · 31 Jul 2019 at 13:32

The big hosting companies ten to have a "one click" install.

Megahurtz400 · 31 Jul 2019 at 16:00

Cheers for the replies guys, i'll have a look

Lakeland said:
Forums are pretty much dead though, are you sure you want to?

This niche is extremely community driven and always comes with loads of questions and I just can't find a forum related to it anywhere, most of the info is in youtube or forum posts which just tend to be a nightmare to search/locate and useful information.

I'm only really doing it for fun so if it doesn't take off it doesn't matter too much

touch · 31 Jul 2019 at 17:10

Yep, you'd best to copy the same setup as we have here. 2 separate sites, 1 with phpBB or similar and one with wordpress or similar. Use the www. domain for the main site and something like forums.domain.com for the forum site then you can have a link to the forum site in your menu. Either have a link to the homepage from the forum site (like we have here) or copy the whole menu structure so you have links to each page and most visitors wont even notice it's a separate site.

Deleted member 77746 · 31 Jul 2019 at 18:46

Don't use wordpress it's horrible, stick with bootstrap sites.

soulhunter123 · 29 Aug 2019 at 00:49

Have you considered using a platform like https://www.discourse.org/ ? It's a more modern approach than a forum. Not necessarily better, mind you, but just an idea.