I am curious to know everyones opinion on this. When is it good to have a home/index page instead of having the forums on the index page. I am curious because its annoying for some people that go to forums for exampe DP and have to type in forums.digitalpoint.com etc. But the forum I am considering I want to not only have forums but other things as well so I was curious to know what you guys thought. Thanks!
Personally I suggest to get at least some kind of portal page, with eg recent topics, stats, news,... And what other features do you want? You can always use some kind of CMS that integrates well with the forum.
well i am going to run various things on one domain so the forum will be a seperate thing next to directory and some other things. The portal page I kind of like the idea but it then would prevent the user from going to the forum so they would have to go to the actual domain then the subdomain/portal page then the forums lol
I think if your site is ONLY a forum, then it is good to have the forum on the main page. If a forum is just one part of your site, then your main site page should be an introduction to your site, and your forums could either be a subdirectory or a subdomain. Even when you only have a forum, a portal page such as Diether describes allows your members to see an overview page of your website. I think that is more important than what you have to type. Most people go from a favorite or click a link anyway, so they don't type in the URL.