Blogspot blog: Adding a forum to blogger

HOW TO CREATE FORUM ON BLOGGER WITH NABBLE

One of the greatest tool that can enhance and improve the quality of a blog is a forum. A forum is necessary on every blog for both interactive and popularity's sake. A blog with a forum is likely more unique users. It also makes the work of the blogger easy as you wount have to worry about SEO due to the number of posts that emerge from your forum most of which have SEO potentials.
Unfortunately most bloggers using blogger platform are not aware that they can add forum to their blog in just a few and simple steps which is the reason for this post. In this article, I'll be taking you through this simple steps.

Step1.

Go to www.nabble.com and signup to create a forum.
You will recieve a link to your forum by email.

Step2.

Creating the forum alone doesn't make it effective so you will have to do some little work just as you did on your blog when you were creating it.
There are various features you could use while creating a nabble forum. Lets look at a highlight of some of the basic configurations you will be making to keep your forum going.

1. Creating sub-forums:

just like categories, it is very important to divide your pages into various sections so as to make it navigable to users. For example, when creating a forum for a sports site, you may have to divide your forum into various sub-forums  so that football will be discussed on a page seperate from basket ball and other games.
To create a sub-forum simply go to options>application>create new sub-forum

2. Changing the look of your forum:

You may want to make your forum look proffessional by changing the look. It is advisable to make the colour of the forum match with that of your site.
To do this goto; Options>structure>change appearance

Step 3.

You just created a forum but its not on your site yet (which is what you want). Now its time to get your forum up and running on your site.

To do this go to; Option>Embedding options then copy the link in the box

Now go back to your blog's dashboard. Goto; Pages>create new page
Name it forum. Navigate to the html part, delete the characters in the html box and paste the code you copied earlier in the empty box.
Make sure you disable comment mode (this option should be on the right side bar) before publishing the page. On clicking the publish button, blogger will give you a notification that you tampered with the html settings of the page. Click dismiss then publish.

Step4.

You now have a forum on your blog but its not visible to your users yet. To get it live on your blog, go to; Layout, click to add widget on any bar you wish to display your forum page (it is recommended to display pages at the top bar of your blog). Save your settings.
Congratulation! You now have a forum live on your blog.
Hope it helps.