I'm new to forum management. Can you guys let me know what should I do next? I set up my forum here webmastersph.com aside from the template, what other things should I do next? Should I make more posts? Hire posters? Thanks
Of course, you need to complete the design first. Find a good template or hire a designer. Next you need to get your site indexed in search engines and got some backlinks, try to get traffic from other forums, social communities etc. Open a few helpful/interesting topics in each section and hire some posters, so they' be able to kepp your forum alive while you're working on traffic. Then, you'll have some results in a month, I think. I'd also recommend you to setup some SEO plugins such as vBSEO to get better indexing of your board posts. To be successful, your forum needs to be interesting and that's the point. But the sad thing is that there are so many webmaster forums/communities and it's rather difficult to get your own members...
I already have vbseo. So which is most important right now, of all the things you said. Aside from the template. I think its not that important at the moment.
I believe template play a major role also. Do please your users. Maybe you can get the simple template, but dont take it for granted. I do keep visiting some forums because of their friendly design and I also left some forums,because its bad design. Just dont too put too much effort on the template. At least not now.
template + backlinks + forum posters These things are must. And the most important is content. If members (and first member is you) will be helpful to answer the questions and post related info, site is gonna to grow up. And DO NOT neglect with template, take care of your visitors
my advice to anyone that wants to start their own forum, get experience. ESPECIALLY with the admin cp that you will be using, i suggest working your way up or helping someone else with a forum script the same as yours, get good experience and managing it, doing mods, template edits correctly. once you think you know it fairly well. create your own. dont just be excited and then have to ask simplest things like... how can i install my forum? all my files are there but forums not working? i llike to help out anyone in those situations, but i still look down upon them as they are so stupid to rush into it. just yeh. btw, templates/skins/themes whatever you call them, MATTER alot in fact, DP might use a default skin, but if your forum has a cirtain focus point, reflect that with a nice clean design. even if its similar to the default.. if you need assistance, add me on msn
Current theme looks nice, you just need more content. I also noticed that some sections have ZERO posts, that's bad. I suggest you make a couple of posts there, also you might want to look into buying some advertising. Check out the marketplace section on this forum and see if you can find an affordable site to advertise on.
Looks fine, your issue is its dead as hell so why would anyone sign up? You need posts, that is most your battle. Make tons yourself under various accounts if needed, you must have a couple of friends who will post, hire posters. That is the start, after that can think about seo, giveaways, marketing etc. Right now, you simply have nothing to market tbh.