Some of the content on your site can come from the on-line community who visit your site. Depending on the type of site you want to run, it may actually be preferable to allow the content to come from the visitors themselves. Discussion Boards allow your visitors to post their observations, opinions, questions, jokes or whatever else they choose directly on your site. A Best Web™ runs a great discussion board about mostly affiliate marketing issues. The members there regularly post questions, answers, tips, and queries for help.

Discussion boards are also great because they keep people coming back day after day. As proud as we are of the features we built into this site, we don't expect someone who went through our site promotions section on Tuesday to return to it on Thursday. Yet, that visitor might very well return to check out the new information on the discussion boards, and those who post questions will almost always return to see if they've been answered.

You can put a discussion board right on your web site by utilizing the software of your choice. If you have doubts about installing it yourself, you can usually hire the service cheaply.

VBulletin is known all over the web as a good bulletin board, and well worth the low price. We've been very impressed by their software, and there is a great community of users you can chat with at their site. There are plenty of "hacks" that you can find to add to VBulletin for style and use. This tends to be one of the most popular webmaster choices for a discussion board.

A second option is to have your discussion boards hosted on someone else's site. The advantages of this are that the service is free, you wouldn't have to pay for any software, you wouldn't have to worry about any maintenance, and the space the board takes up would come off of their server instead of yours.

Bravenet.com Forums are a free way to add interactivity to your Web Site.

And advantage of the Bravenet.com board is that you don't need to own your own domain name or have a CGI-bin or be able to install Perl scripts. The control panel at Bravenet.com helps you customize and set up your forum board. Bravenet.com uses ads on your boards to keep their service free. Of course, you can pay for ad-free space, but then perhaps you would be happier buying one of the above programs.

If you feel up to installing and hosting your own discussion board, a great one is phpBB. We are very impressed with the versatility and end user experience of phpBB.