Homepage vs. Forum Index

I was considering adding a homepage to my forums with several other pages, rather then have my URL lead straight to the forum index.

What's your opinion on having a homepage for a forum? Do you think it draws the attention of visitors away from the forum, or keep them interested?

Thanks.

 

Homepage, as in a simple html file, or a content management system with lots of articles?

For my sons forum, I installed wordpress in the html root and then installed VBulletin in a /forum folder. I think it works out pretty well. The website uses one meta description, while the forum uses a different one. Instead of allowing comments in the wordpress post, a link is posted at the bottom of the article going to a thread in the forum. And then the forum is used as the commenting system.

But if you are going to to do something like that, you have to be dedicated enough to continue to post articles on the home page on a regular basis.

 

I think it will be good to have a Forum index, taking user friendly layout into consideration

 

I thought about something like this, posting news and announcements on the homepage that link to the forum. I like the idea of just having a standard HTML homepage, 2 sidebars, body, header, and footer.

 

From a usability standpoint I like the idea as so many forums look very plain and don't explain well to new users what is going on. But most users visiting Forums already get it.

My biggest concern is the Forum gets dropped another level deep, so when your site gets crawled if you are not already popular it is less likely the deeper pages in your forum will be crawled and indexed.

I also use a version of "hanging" forums off of Joomla or Wordpress sites with a folder tab. But I don't worry about the Forum content being indexed so much as it is only a small part of the overall site.

 

Yeah a homepage as you have planned will be a good idea.

 

Depends what you want to achieve. Probably a landing page that serves as some kind of advertisement or a summary about what the forum behind is all about, is a good idea. The other approach mentioned here - using a blogging software, would require frequent updating, otherwise people would get bored seeing the same article every time they want to enter the forum...