Forum request?

[Craig]

Would appreciate a consensus and ask the opinion of our gracious host whether separate forums based upon software platforms would be helpful and attract additional visitors on the site.

My short list of requests and especially since I'm starting to become heavily involved in Flash and FLV would be Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop or general graphics forum, Microsoft FrontPage, etc.

[flutem3]

Craig wrote:

Would appreciate a consensus and ask the opinion of our gracious host whether separate forums based upon software platforms would be helpful and attract additional visitors on the site.

Hi, Craig,

As a person who does not have the skills which you do, I enjoy having the conversations about platforms, etc. mixed in with the other information.

I imagine for you, however, it is a pain to search through other information for the stuff you want.

I like it as part of the whole forum. I have no clue whether having a separate place would draw more visitors or not. However, I don't see why there could not be a "dedicated" thread to cover your issues.

Have a good day.

Carol

[David Gillaspey]

our gracious host Well, thanks!

Would appreciate a consensus and ask the opinion of our gracious host whether separate forums based upon software platforms would be helpful and attract additional visitors on the site.Hi Craig,

I appreciate your asking the question.

(Note: I use the term "topics" in my answer in place of your term "forums," to avoid confusion of terms, because this whole site is a "forum.")

I launched this forum last fall (2004) at the encouragement of an individual who 1) believed strongly there ought to be a forum devoted specifically to church webmasters, and 2) was willing to underwrite one-half of the cost of the forum software I now use (vBulletin), a deal I couldn't pass up. (Actually, I initially went with phpBB2 before later switching to vBulletin at his encouragement.)

Before I "went public" with the forum, I spent time thinking through what the topics should be. Like you, I felt that there ought to be topics for Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, Flash, Frontpage, etc. ? the biggies. I proudly showed my carefully considered list of topics to this individual. He strongly advised against going this route, for two reasons:

1) His opinion was that a forum should start with a small number of topics, and add topics as needed. The reason for this was that having a large number of topics at first would result in many topics having few if any posts, which would discourage new posts.

2) He felt that my particular predefined list of topics duplicated too much the existing vast resources of the forums hosted by http://www.sitepoint.com, a webmaster's mecca. (Hmmm ... can I say that on a Christian website?)

I ended up agreeing with him and revised and downscaled my list of topics. (I've since added all those "Conversation starters" topics, which has been moderately successful in attracting members and posts.)

Looking back, I would have to say that time proved my advisor/benefactor to be correct. If you look at the Software tools "conversation starter"

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27

for example, it turns out that church webmasters use a far wider array of software tools in their work than I ever could have imagined. It would have been presumptuous of me to have predefined topics around just the particular tools (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, ImageReady) that I happen to use or know about it.

(However, my advisor/benefactor ended up not being very active in this forum after all, so it may be I disappointed him anyway.)

Having said all that, this forum exists to benefit people such as yourself ? people actively involved in doing church websites ? so if the consensus of the forum members is that there ought to be topics specific to certain software, I would be happy to add them.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites
(and forum administrator)