Not sure what the difference is between a forum and a website? Wondering which you should install and use on your website? Perhaps you should use both?
If you are not sure what the difference is between a forum and a weblog then we will start with looking at what each of these does.
What is a forum?
For a start, a forum is a way of members leaving comments and talking with each other. You as the web site owner will create different areas of the forum, which are the high level topics. Members could then visit these different areas and create a new thread, which is a conversation. Other members will see the new thread and read the first post, adding their thoughts in new posts.
So a forum is a way of members starting and running conversations. It is good for your website as the members will visit regularly to see what new threads other members have started and to place replies on the threads that they are commenting on. Your members are generating lots of web site comment, which might drive more visitors to your web site!
What is a website?
A weblog in the traditional sense start with you the web site owner, perhaps with a team of other authors, writing posts about whatever subjects that you choose to start writing round.
Members of a site are readers and they may follow your latest writing through email alerts or by watching your RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed. This alerts them to the latest posts and they might go straight to the posts that interest them.
Their involvement in the weblog is to read your posts and if there is a real community feel they might even get about to leaving the odd comments. You might want to reply and on occasion they might reply back.
Where are they the same?
The purpose of both a forum and a website is to get your traffic coming back time after time and feeling like they are part of the community of the website. They are both tools that build up a community of the site and hopefully customer loyalty. In both, your traffic might leave comments for others to read.
So, where are they different?
There is a huge fundamental difference between the two features of a web site and both could be used together. In a website, you the website owner write a post round whatever you want and readers may then leave easy comments. But in a forum, it is the readers that start the discussion and they are over impending to come back and add more thoughts to the topics being discussed. Your involvement as the website owner is probably only to keep an eye on the posts and remove any inappropriate entries.
So a forum and a weblog are both tools to make visitors feel that they are part of your site, keep them interested and returning to find out what it going on, but in ablog you are in control totally of the topics that are being discussed whereas in a forum the members might start new discussions.
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