[Experienced Webmaster + Newbie Forum Admin] Starting a forum and need some advice.

I am an experienced webmaster, but never been a forum admin. I am planning to start a new forum with my friend and did some extensive research about the same. Now I have a broad idea of things but bit confused over few points.

1) I am very sure that vbulletin is the best choice of forum software so I will go with it. But should I use vb 4 or vb3.x?
I am not a great coder, and as per Shawn's suggestion 3.8.5 is good option for ppl like me

2) What about VBSeo? Should I go for it?

3) When I buy vbulletin license, say vb4, will I be able to download and use vb 3.x versions? (I know its utterly noob question )

4) Any other suggestions and advice or precautions before starting a forum? Especially regarding SEO and mistakes which can't be (easily) rectified later.

EDIT: One more question. About hosting. Will my hostgator shared account be able to host my forum, or should I go for dedicated resource.

 

To be honest, the best thing to do is to download both versions so that you can have a play around with them. I personally am still running vb3, as I am not ready to update to vB4. However, one thing you must consider is that although it may be easier to use vb3 at the moment, there will come a point where you must upgrade to vB4 and this will mean ensuring your modifications work and you can get a good style. When you consider this, you may want to just start off with vB4 so that you save yourself from the mess later.

As for vBSEO; again it's up to you. Many forum admins have had great success with vBSEO and forum optimisation and I must admit, it does handle a lot of key issues. However, there are a number of free modfications which you can download to do similar jobs etc. Take a look at this forum - it's a huge forum but there URLs haven't been rewritten. It really depends on if you can afford to get it (after all it is a substantial payment on top of your vBulletin license).

There are a whole number of issues that can occur and a lot of needs to be considered; you will have to be more specific wth which aspects. One key rule though, that I will state, is Content is King! Make sure you have plenty of content every day so that members have new things to read. I wrote an article on my forum a while back, which is lengthy but covers A LOT regarding forums: The A-Z of Forum Construction

Finally, there is no issue whatsoever with using your shared account. Maybe once your forum is rather large etc then you might think of getting a dedicated server, but to start off with, there shouldn't be a problem.

If you want further help, feel free to ask here, or for more specific help you can ask at my forum.

 

as a long time user of vBulletin I would say go for it.

** I would say that vb3.8 is better then vb4 and will stay that way for a long time because their is not as many mods/support for vb4 yet **

** Yes it helps so much and can even help reduce website page load times by a lot along with massive increases in SEO **

** Yes you can **

** vBulletin is quite good about making everything fixable so nothing you can do will permanently mess up your forum. **

** I am not sure how good host gator servers are but I know the current host I am using working very well on a shared plan. Once you get about 100 users or more on at a single time you will need to upgrade to a better server **

PM me if you have any further questions