Hello I have many gaming sites, and my new one looks good: www.gamerhome.co.uk One thing I haven't tried or haven't yet been successful with is a community forum, the new site now will feature a bulletin forum. But how do i go about getting a community? My ideas are providing regular competitions to members each month, maybe, Top Poster award, Best poster award, most active award ect.. Could you help with ideas on the forum and look at my site so you can get ideas that match with my gaming site (btw) it has not much content atm.
Free stuff = more members. With that said I think you should give away a game a month or a controller or something, just go to the store and pick cheap games for $20 to give to members. I suggest paying 20 people as paid posters to before you start advertising your forum.
I commented on your design over at SP. It looks a lot better now with the images beside each post on the homepage. I think the main thing with a new forum is to start small. Don't go creating 100's of boards. It'll look empty. Start with a few, so that the whole board appears busy to new visitors. To get people visiting, place a link at the bottom of each article (eg "Click here to discuss this game in our forums"). You also have a nice big 'featured article' space on your homepage. You could use that space to promote the forums for a while too. Hope that helps.
Also thanks bodger, i think adding dicuss this game in the forum is a good idea and will hopefully add this.
The forum looks great, it has a nice look and feel to it, now you should focus on driving more traffic to it.
Your site is called a "Home for Gamers", but you do not have a PC gaming section? Why? By excluding PC gamers, you have lost at the very least 600,000 - 1 million visitors, and this is just people that use steam - http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats Steam is what lets people play counter-stike, team fortress 2, half-life and half-life 2. Counter-stike is one of the most popular online games ever made. If you want to exclude one of the most popular games ever made, hey its your site. But you hvae done more then exclude just a few games, you have excluded an entire group of gamers. I play PC games, not consoles.
Hello kev, the platforms we will support are: PS2, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii and PC. As we haven't and content in Wii or PC section they aren't currently appearing. If the site takes off we would also like to cover PSP, DS and MAc