How important is design to the success of a forum?
How important do you think design is to the success of a forum? It’s an extremely popular topic on web design forums. Content or design? Which has the bigger effect on the success of a forum?
I don’t think anyone would argue that a forum can succeed without good content, but how big of a part does the design play in that success?
Helps your site stand out
How many web design forums have you been to? There are thousands. How many stand out? Maybe a handful. Look at sites like WebMasterWorld.com or Photo.net. They are forums in two very popular niches, but they stand out because of their design. Of course content helps too, but I’d argue that neither would be as popular if they were using the stock blue theme in SMF. And to cut off your next thought, yes, I know they’re both running custom software; but the point is still the same.
When I first started my photography forum I had the stock blue SMF theme. There were members, and there were posts, but it just didn’t feel right to me. So about six months in I decided to sit down and start a new theme. It started out with the stock theme as a base, but quickly became its own design.
Shows you’re willing to spend the effort
This may just be me, but I generally bypass forums that use that stock designs unless the content is above average. If there’s a custom design, even if it’s just very limited, I’ll be more likely to hang around. I think having something other than a stock design makes it at least appear that the forum administrator is willing to put time and effort into the forum, which hopefully correlates to it being a better forum and hanging around.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to spend weeks coming up with a custom theme, especially if it’s your first. Even minor CSS tweaks and changing out default graphics can have a significant effect on the style of your forum.
Search engine benefits
One of the problems I had with the out-of-the-box SMF theme I had been using was that it wasn’t very search engine friendly, and was difficult to tweak to make it so. SEO4SMF helped some, but post content was still wrapped in table cells without any type of headings which made it difficult to get search engine spiders to bite on what I wanted them to.
My new design makes heavy use of header tags to highlight content I want the search engine spiders to pick up as important along with <strong>.
Better design techniques
This one is arguable, which is why I left it for last. Forum designs tend to use a lot of tables for layout. Yes, most of the time it’s appropriate because the data is tabular. But most of the themes I’ve seen wrap the entire page in tables whether it’s necessary or not. In many cases it would be better from a design, speed, and web standards point of view to use divs instead.
Downsides?
Sure, like everything else a custom theme can have its downsides.
First is the resources, either time or money, that it takes to get your new forum design online. I spent a little over 60 hours to create the theme for my forum. Were I paying someone for that time it would have been thousands of dollars. In my case it’s primarily a hobby site so money isn’t really an issue, but it’s something to consider.
And you have to consider your users. When I switched from the default theme to my custom theme several users complained. One even threatened to leave until he found that the default theme was still available as an option. The most common complaint was that the new design wasn’t laid out like other forums and it took a little time for the learning curve.
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