There are a few additional features that you may consider to complement your phpBB forum-driven Web pages.

These features are:

1. RSS feeds;
2. Printing areas of your choice;
3. Recommend to a friend / Send this topic to a friend;
4. Online bookmarking services.

Let us further describe each of these extra facilities and their benefits to you.

1. RSS Feeds

Most of the open source forum applications do not come with RSS feeds by default.

We can provide you with an automatic facility to generate an RSS feed for each and every forum from your forum installation.

The process is automatic. The RSS feeds and corresponding linking coding are generated for both existing and future forums.

Your benefit here is that your forum visitors automatically get notified when there are new posts on your forum.

Without RSS feeds your visitors won’t get notified about new posts on your forums unless they manually check each and every forum on your Web site.

2. Printing Areas of Your Choice

Unless you have implemented an advanced printing facility, the print-out your audience will get on their attempt to print your forum pages will contain some unnecessary items such as:

• Header and footer;
• Side columns (left, right etc.);

The on screen area may also by wider than the printable area and therefore your forum layout may appear broken on the print-out.

Sample

If you are running a Windows machine check out how your forum pages print by following these steps:

1. Go to a page from within your Forum;
2. Click on "Print" (from your browser window);
3. Select your preferred printer and check the box that says: "Print to file";
4. Click "Print" and there we go.

Check your print out!

The solution we are proposing involves printing selected areas of your choice.

To make things easy for you we will also suggest those areas that we think are not worth isteding on the print-out, then we will discuss them with you in a live session online and agree them with you.

Your audience will now enjoy a professionally designed forum print-out in line with what you actually intended to provide.

To give you an example of what this function could do for you, let’s say you have a nicely coloured header running on all your forum pages.

You would obviously try to do something to avoid your audience printing that header for a number of reasons such as:

• It may be wider than the printable area;
• It may waste too much colour ink;
• It may use too much space etc.

Now, there are a few approaches we could follow here. One is to eliminate the header from the print-out and the other is to nicely replace it with a simpler/smaller one that could be image or text based.

Your benefit here is that you can control the way your print-out looks. You could in one hand turn off from printing certain items that are on the screen version, or on the other hand you could even enrich your forum pages print-out by adding extra items that were not on the screen version. This way you could feature your print out with a copyright statement, forum page URL etc.

3. Recommend to a friend

Let your users recommend to a friend or even send to their own email addresses those forum pages they find worth reading.

Your benefit here is that you will get more visits and therefore have your Web site better known.

Comparing to other online marketing techniques, this mouth-to-mouth system assures a maximum conversion ratio between recommendations / new visitors.

4. Online Bookmarking services

Known also as social networking services, the online bookmarking services allow your visitors to bookmark their preferred pages from your Forum Installation.

The bookmarking is made directly to online services such as digg, technorati etc.

Your benefit here is that your audience could easily bookmark your forum pages, but most importantly that by this online bookmarking all other users could notice this bookmark and may check out your Forum Web page.

Such a facility may boost your forum audience and search engines ranking such as Google PR.

 

Live Support

 

Check out our other phpBB Forum Consultancy Services below:

1. phpBB Installation
2. phpBB Layout Customization
3. phpBB Search Engines Optimization
4. phpBB AntiSpam Protection
5. phpBB Extra Facilities
6. phpBB Upgrade