I am so excited to move my website from Wix to UltimateWB. I will be having a blog and forum, so I’m wondering how you think I should use the two apps together to create a really good online community?
A blog and a forum can work very well together when you’re building an online community. The key is to give each one a different role rather than treating them as duplicate parts of your website.
Your blog can attract people and give them useful content, while your forum gives them a place to create their own discussions, interact with other members, and keep coming back.
And there are other ways you can let people participate, too.
Use Your Blog to Attract and Inform People
Your blog can be one of the main ways people discover your website.
Write useful articles related to the interests of your community. Answer common questions, share helpful information, discuss interesting topics, and create content that people will want to read and share.
The blog also gives you an opportunity to establish the focus and personality of your community.
For example, if you’re building a community around photography, your blog could have articles about photography techniques, equipment, photo editing, and photography projects. Those articles can then lead naturally into discussions in your forum.
Blog Comments Are Useful – But a Forum Offers More
With the integrated WordPress blog option in UltimateWB, you can also have comments on your blog posts. That’s a great way for readers to respond to a particular article and discuss what you’ve written.
But a forum can take the conversation much further.
A blog comment is connected to a specific blog post. A forum gives your community a place where members themselves can create topics.
For example, a member might want to ask a question that isn’t related to any particular blog post. They might want to start a discussion, share an experience, ask other members for advice, or create an ongoing conversation around a particular subject. They might even want to create a poll for their topic. They can do all that.
That’s where the forum becomes especially valuable.
You can organize discussions into categories and let members start their own topics and respond to other members. Instead of the website owner always deciding what the conversation is about, the community can help determine what gets discussed.
Connect Your Blog Posts and Forum Discussions
The blog and forum can also send people back and forth between each other.
When you publish a blog post about a particular subject, link to a relevant forum discussion and invite readers to continue the conversation there.
For example:
Have a question about this topic or want to share your own experience? Join the discussion in our forum.
You can also go in the other direction.
If a forum discussion becomes particularly interesting, it could inspire a future blog post. You might summarize the discussion, answer some of the questions that came up, or turn the community’s experiences into a more comprehensive article.
This creates a useful relationship between the two:
Blog content can bring new people to your website, while forum discussions can help generate ideas for new content.
Let Members Publish Their Own Articles
Another option to think about is whether you want to allow others to publish their own blogs or articles. Community members don’t have to be limited to forum posts and can contribute their own longer-form content.
You could have a community where the website owner publishes the main blog, while members can submit their own articles, guides, experiences, or other content. Or you can all just post to the same articles section.
UltimateWB’s built-in Articles app is designed for this type of user-generated content. You can configure who has access to post, and whether to automatically approve submissions or require administrator approval before they go live. You can have different settings for visitors vs members.
Articles can include photos and videos, and you can add comments and ratings as well as social sharing. There are also tools for finding content, including an Articles Search Tool, category index pages, and automatically generated related articles.
Give Different Types of Content Their Own Place
Not everyone participates in an online community in exactly the same way.
Some people prefer to read. Some like to comment. Some want to ask questions. Others want to write detailed articles or share their own experiences.
You can accommodate those different preferences by giving different types of content their own place:
Blog: Announcements, news, guides, tips, and other editorial content.
Blog comments: Discussion and reactions related to a specific blog post.
Articles: Longer-form content submitted by members or visitors, if you want to allow user-generated articles.
Forum: Member-created topics, questions, conversations, and ongoing discussions.
You don’t need to use all of these. The right combination depends on the type of community you’re building.
A Real-World Example
You can see how this type of structure can work on different kinds of websites.
For example, the UltimateWB website itself uses different sections for different purposes. The blog is used for announcements, guides, news, tips, and other articles – aptly labeled as “Articles & Guides” in our navigation menu, under the “Connect” tab. The Articles app is used for more structured information, such as our knowledgebase and user manual, with ratings and comments. The forum provides a place for support questions, discussions, and interaction between users.
Another example is Gym Chat, which has a blog for announcements and other updates, an articles section where users can share their own articles, and a forum for ongoing discussions. Gym Chat actually uses many other of our UltimateWB built-in social apps too, for user-generated content – including photos, videos, music, sports club listings and stores directory, classifieds, and an events calendar.
This kind of structure gives people multiple ways to participate. From posting a review of their gymnastics or other sports club, to finding a job at a gym, to sharing their photos from a sports competition. This gives people many different ways to contribute to the community based on their interests, rather than limiting participation to written discussions.
Encourage Members to Participate
Once you’ve created different ways for people to participate, make it clear that their contributions are welcome.
Depending on the type of community you’re building, members might:
Start forum discussions
Answer questions from other members
Comment on blog posts or articles
Share photos, projects, or experiences
Submit their own articles
Participate in community challenges or projects
Respond to questions and acknowledge useful contributions. Highlight particularly interesting discussions or member-created content when appropriate.
You can also use incentives if they make sense for your community.
For example, the UltimateWB Rewards app can give members points for activities such as adding posts and comments. That can provide an additional reason for members to participate.
The rewards don’t have to be the main reason people are there, though. The real goal is to create a community that people find useful and enjoyable enough that they want to participate.
Keep the Community Welcoming
A good community also needs some structure.
Set clear community guidelines and moderate discussions so that people feel comfortable participating. Keep spam and disruptive behavior under control while still allowing members to express different opinions and have genuine conversations.
You want people to feel that they can actually participate rather than simply read announcements from the site owner.
A particularly valuable stage for an online community is when members start helping members.
Someone asks a question, another member answers it, someone else adds their experience, and eventually the discussion becomes useful to many other people who come across it.
That’s when your community starts creating value of its own.
Ready to design & build your own online community? Learn more about UltimateWB! We also offer web design packages if you would like your website designed and built for you.
Got a techy/website question? Whether it’s about UltimateWB or another website builder, web hosting, or other aspects of websites, just send in your question in the “Ask David!” form. We will email you when the answer is posted on the UltimateWB “Ask David!” section.
Meet David from the UltimateWB Team
David is a full-stack web developer with over 20 years of experience in programming, design, and server administration (WHM/cPanel), specializing in building high-performance, secure web solutions that prioritize user autonomy. Have a technical hurdle? Ask David!
What are some ways to create an online community using blogs and forums?
Ask David
A blog and a forum can work very well together when you’re building an online community. The key is to give each one a different role rather than treating them as duplicate parts of your website.
Your blog can attract people and give them useful content, while your forum gives them a place to create their own discussions, interact with other members, and keep coming back.
And there are other ways you can let people participate, too.
Use Your Blog to Attract and Inform People
Your blog can be one of the main ways people discover your website.
Write useful articles related to the interests of your community. Answer common questions, share helpful information, discuss interesting topics, and create content that people will want to read and share.
The blog also gives you an opportunity to establish the focus and personality of your community.
For example, if you’re building a community around photography, your blog could have articles about photography techniques, equipment, photo editing, and photography projects. Those articles can then lead naturally into discussions in your forum.
Blog Comments Are Useful – But a Forum Offers More
With the integrated WordPress blog option in UltimateWB, you can also have comments on your blog posts. That’s a great way for readers to respond to a particular article and discuss what you’ve written.
But a forum can take the conversation much further.
A blog comment is connected to a specific blog post. A forum gives your community a place where members themselves can create topics.
For example, a member might want to ask a question that isn’t related to any particular blog post. They might want to start a discussion, share an experience, ask other members for advice, or create an ongoing conversation around a particular subject. They might even want to create a poll for their topic. They can do all that.
That’s where the forum becomes especially valuable.
You can organize discussions into categories and let members start their own topics and respond to other members. Instead of the website owner always deciding what the conversation is about, the community can help determine what gets discussed.
Connect Your Blog Posts and Forum Discussions
The blog and forum can also send people back and forth between each other.
When you publish a blog post about a particular subject, link to a relevant forum discussion and invite readers to continue the conversation there.
For example:
You can also go in the other direction.
If a forum discussion becomes particularly interesting, it could inspire a future blog post. You might summarize the discussion, answer some of the questions that came up, or turn the community’s experiences into a more comprehensive article.
This creates a useful relationship between the two:
Blog content can bring new people to your website, while forum discussions can help generate ideas for new content.
Let Members Publish Their Own Articles
Another option to think about is whether you want to allow others to publish their own blogs or articles. Community members don’t have to be limited to forum posts and can contribute their own longer-form content.
You could have a community where the website owner publishes the main blog, while members can submit their own articles, guides, experiences, or other content. Or you can all just post to the same articles section.
UltimateWB’s built-in Articles app is designed for this type of user-generated content. You can configure who has access to post, and whether to automatically approve submissions or require administrator approval before they go live. You can have different settings for visitors vs members.
Articles can include photos and videos, and you can add comments and ratings as well as social sharing. There are also tools for finding content, including an Articles Search Tool, category index pages, and automatically generated related articles.
Give Different Types of Content Their Own Place
Not everyone participates in an online community in exactly the same way.
Some people prefer to read. Some like to comment. Some want to ask questions. Others want to write detailed articles or share their own experiences.
You can accommodate those different preferences by giving different types of content their own place:
You don’t need to use all of these. The right combination depends on the type of community you’re building.
A Real-World Example
You can see how this type of structure can work on different kinds of websites.
For example, the UltimateWB website itself uses different sections for different purposes. The blog is used for announcements, guides, news, tips, and other articles – aptly labeled as “Articles & Guides” in our navigation menu, under the “Connect” tab. The Articles app is used for more structured information, such as our knowledgebase and user manual, with ratings and comments. The forum provides a place for support questions, discussions, and interaction between users.
Another example is Gym Chat, which has a blog for announcements and other updates, an articles section where users can share their own articles, and a forum for ongoing discussions. Gym Chat actually uses many other of our UltimateWB built-in social apps too, for user-generated content – including photos, videos, music, sports club listings and stores directory, classifieds, and an events calendar.
This kind of structure gives people multiple ways to participate. From posting a review of their gymnastics or other sports club, to finding a job at a gym, to sharing their photos from a sports competition. This gives people many different ways to contribute to the community based on their interests, rather than limiting participation to written discussions.
Encourage Members to Participate
Once you’ve created different ways for people to participate, make it clear that their contributions are welcome.
Depending on the type of community you’re building, members might:
Respond to questions and acknowledge useful contributions. Highlight particularly interesting discussions or member-created content when appropriate.
You can also use incentives if they make sense for your community.
For example, the UltimateWB Rewards app can give members points for activities such as adding posts and comments. That can provide an additional reason for members to participate.
The rewards don’t have to be the main reason people are there, though. The real goal is to create a community that people find useful and enjoyable enough that they want to participate.
Keep the Community Welcoming
A good community also needs some structure.
Set clear community guidelines and moderate discussions so that people feel comfortable participating. Keep spam and disruptive behavior under control while still allowing members to express different opinions and have genuine conversations.
You want people to feel that they can actually participate rather than simply read announcements from the site owner.
A particularly valuable stage for an online community is when members start helping members.
Someone asks a question, another member answers it, someone else adds their experience, and eventually the discussion becomes useful to many other people who come across it.
That’s when your community starts creating value of its own.
Related
Ready to design & build your own online community? Learn more about UltimateWB! We also offer web design packages if you would like your website designed and built for you.
Got a techy/website question? Whether it’s about UltimateWB or another website builder, web hosting, or other aspects of websites, just send in your question in the “Ask David!” form. We will email you when the answer is posted on the UltimateWB “Ask David!” section.
Meet David from the UltimateWB Team
David is a full-stack web developer with over 20 years of experience in programming, design, and server administration (WHM/cPanel), specializing in building high-performance, secure web solutions that prioritize user autonomy. Have a technical hurdle? Ask David!