I’ve built a few large forums over the past 6-8 years.  I took one forum from scratch up a little past two million posts with about 125,000 users, and I have another one that’s getting close to the 100,000 user mark.  However, I also have about a half-dozen small forums that are just getting off the ground.  I thought I’d share a few tips on how to effectively manage small forums without spending too much time on each one.

The key to building a successful forum is to treat every new member like gold.  In particular, if they post something you need to reply.  In addition, you need to quickly moderate any spam that comes your way.  As a forum gets larger, these problems become easier to manage because you have a lot of users to welcome newbies and a lot of moderators.  Early on, though, it can be tough.

I employ two simple techniques to help me out:

• RSS Feeds. Almost every forum package available will push an RSS feed of new threads.  In vBulletin, for example, you just append “external.php?type=RSS2” to your URL and it becomes an RSS feed!  Here is an example. I put all of my forum RSS feeds into Google Reader so I can keep up with them.  That way, I can quickly respond to new threads and clean out any spam without having to visit each site all the time.
• E-mail Notification. This is even easier.  When I respond to a thread in one of my forums, I almost always enable e-mail notification for that topic.  This sends new information to me, instead of making me go out there and find it.

Again, as your forum grows you’ll probably need to scale back on these activities and focus more on finding quality moderators to assist you.  In the meantime, though, those two simple tips can help save you a lot of time.

I was looking for a way to make a good-looking chart for one of my sites.  I made one in Excel, but it was pretty bland.  Then I discovered the NCES Create A Graph website.  It’s actually a kid’s site, but has some slick tools to make some good-looking charts and graphs.

Combined with the WordPress FancyZoom plug-in I showed a few days ago, this can make for a great way to show charts on your website.  Here is the page I used it on, showing the diminishing level of a lake near Atlanta.

Oddly enough, the first post on this SEO blog has nothing to do with SEO or monetization…

I use WordPress for a handful of sites, so I’m always on the lookout for handy plug-ins.  I found this one today and just had to share it.  This is a plug-in for WordPress that makes any linked image have an on-page zoom effect, rather than just a simple link to the image.  Click the image to the right to see what I mean.

This is accomplished using a plug-in built around the “FancyZoom” script.  It’s a standard WordPress plug-in, though it does require one minor template edit (changing the “body” tag in your header).  It’s about a two minute install and it does a great job.

The plug-in can be found here and the original FancyZoom script can be found here.  Here is another live site that is running the plug-in.

Very easy, very slick, and free.  Gotta love it!

Reading Time: 2 minutesI was trying to contact some large churches in the Atlanta area to see what they were doing to try to conserve water during the current drought. I used a list from 2005 of “Atlanta’s 25 Largest Places of Worship” (paper copy — not available online).

These are BIG churches. The smallest

budget listed was $2.2 million, with the largest being $23.5 million. There is simply no excuse for some of the bad techniques on these sites.

You’ll notice that some churches show up in multiple lists, while about 1/4 of them had no obvious problems. I’ll admit that I didn’t dig very deep into the sites, as I was just trying to find contact info.

On the list, three of them had an intro that I had to choose to skip. That’s always bad practice:

• newbirth.org (it also locked up my browser with its fanciness once I got in)
• transfiguration.org
• rayofhope.org

One church tried to disable my right-click. Not only is that very easy to get around (a simple menu option in Firefox), but it makes the site harder to use. I was looking for contact info, but when I found the e-mail address I wanted, I would have had to type it into gmail instead of copy/paste.

• peachtreepres.org

There were quite a few that lost their navigation when JavaScript was disabled. That’s simply inexcusable:

• transfiguration.com
• roswellstreet.com
• mountparan.com
• prumc.org
• stphilipscathedral.org (the main menu still works, but there is then no way to ever access sub-items)
• newhopebc.org (pretty much the whole page dies except the footer)

A handful had oversized images on the front of their site — large images that were scaled down using HTML, which results in slow load times and jagged images:

• saintcatherineofsiena.org
• saintbrigid.org
• roswellstreet.com
• templesinaiatlanta.org

Of the list, only two of them used proper canonicalization (having “site.com” automatically add the www and redirect to “www.site.com”, mostly for search engine purposes). This was especially sad because a lot of them had automatic redirects on the home page to some horrible long URL (“snellvilleumc.org” becomes “http://snellvilleumc.org/templates/cussnellvilleumc/default.asp?id=31612”) and they still didn’t bother to drop in the “www”:

• mtbethel.org (the church I work for)
• total-grace.org

So 23 churches didn’t canonicalize properly. Not a huge deal. Two of them were even worse, though — they don’t load at all without the www!

• st-ann.org (www.st-ann.org works)
• mountpisgah.org (www.mountpisgah.org works)

For the most part, they had pretty bad page titles.

Here’s what I suggest, but there were a lot of “Welcome to blah blah church”. The worst was rumc.com, with the title of “Home Page”. Very useful, thanks.

The last one is an interesting case of multiple URLs. I typed in christtheking-atl.org, which took me to cathedralofchristtheking.org. No problem. Then I noticed that all of the e-mail addresses were “@ctking.com”. I wonder why they don’t redirect there? Turns out that ctking.com doesn’t even load! Very strange.

That’s about it. I could have spent longer digging through all of them, but that took long enough as it was. The other sad thing is that I e-mailed all of these churches over 24 hours ago and I’ve only heard back from three of them. This e-mail is a way to get them favorable coverage on a pretty high-traffic blog (Atlanta Water Shortage), yet most haven’t even bothered to reply.

Have heart, small churches! Big budgets don’t always help.