forum for college

i want to start a forum for colleges, now the questions is there is 50 states and too many college per states.
do you think is possible or it may look to big and boring once i start to add colleges to the forum like this:
Alabama
college name
college name
college name
Alaska
college name
college name
college name
Arizona
college name
college name
college name
Arkansas
college name
college name
college name
California
college name
college name
college name
etc
etc
etc

any advice is appreciated.
thanks in advance.

 

It will be too boring if you will actually do it like that; an absolute maximum of forums (subforums not included) I maintain is 50. So, if you go add all colleges AND states ..well, you get hundreds of forums.
That is very "depressing" for people; as the main page takes long to load then.
What you could do is some kind of structure like this: (hoping that you have subforum abilities)
This is how I work:
CATEGORY NAME
- Forum name
-- Subforum name

ANNOUNCEMENTS
- Forum announcements
- Introductions
- etc etc

COLLEGES
- State #1
-- Popular college #1
-- Popular college #2
-- Other colleges
- State #2
-- ... etc etc

Hope this helps a bit. But never add too many forums!

 

yes i was thinking the same or maybe i can create the states and let the members create the thread about the college they want to talk.
thanks for the reply

 

You could also use the college sports team name instead of just the college- -

IE Iowa "Hawkeyes"

 

uhm great idea that will drive not only college students to the forums.


thanks

 

Your quite welcome

 

The most important thing for college forums is however to have enough members.
About your idea of thread creation per college, maybe that's quite limited, but you could set up some kind of system where it says [COLLEGE-NAME] before the topic name. For phpbb you have such a modification I think. Not sure about vBulletin or SMF.

 

I would suggest starting without doing any individual states or colleges. A good forum is always busting at the seams with members wanting it to expand. A dead forum usually has 25 empty categories.

Start small. When they start clamoring for more, then create the states and move the appropriate posts into them. As a particular state starts to get busy (or dominated by a single college), then start breaking into individual college sub-forums.

 

Don't get me wrong, but college/university market, especially for forums, is really difficult. You can even find lots of visitors to your site, OK, but your site will perhaps never rank high. Imagine, you are competing with "colleges" and "universities" in your niche, and those .edu sites will almost always rank higher. Second, there are already very old and very established college forums; it will be very difficult to establish yours when there are already some established ones over there that can answer students' questions in a much shorter time.

This being said, if you are really interested, go ahead and do it! If you believe in it, you have chances.

 

got it , thanks to all

 

What are some of the more established college forums? I was also looking to do somethign in this market, but really haven't found much good stuff out there and would appreciate some names of sites. Thanks