Free Forum FrontPage Web Template

Benefits of Two-Way Communication

The advent of easy communication using the web meant the end of one-way communication between businesses and consumers. With feedback as easy as a mouse click, suddenly the onus of response fell on the business, with those businesses which responded well to customer feedback gaining an advantage in the marketplace. In fact, those businesses that did not use feedback mechanisms to communicate with their customers found that their customers talked to each other anyway, usually on a different website, with a variation of the title "Why-This-Business-Sucks.com", and with lively and often unflattering conversations.

On the other hand, businesses that developed its own forum discussions discovered several great advantages:

• Customers became personally invested in the company, developing loyalty and evangelism, as they felt part of the larger body of business.
• Customers became, in effect, an additional support arm. They brought problems to the forum which were quickly solved by other users, much more quickly (if not always as accurately) as a customer support desk.
• The forum became a de facto quality assurance department, with feedback on everything from press releases to past products appearing for free, and discussed at length.

These benefits, in most cases, far outweighed the one burden of having to monitor and police the discussions on the forum. Some of these discussion panels become self-moderating, especially when the company encourages responsible and knowledgeable users to become official moderators, rewarded with company schwag or sometimes just an official title. However, often a part time, or even full time, employee is dedicated to separating the wheat from the chaff, and gleaning the useful information from the forum.

To offset this cost, many businesses that design sites with Microsoft's popular web design suite often look for a free forum FrontPage web template.

Hunting For a Free Forum FrontPage Web Template

The easiest way to find FrontPage templates is the same as any other information on the web: type it into Google. However, just because it is easy does not make it valuable. Before clicking and downloading results from search engines, it is a good idea to keep some other factors in mind:

• Is the template a design that appeals to you? If it doesn't make you want to post, and make it easy to do so, then the odds are your customers will find it even less appealing.
• Is there support for the template? Even the simplest templates require some configuration when integrated into a website. Since the template was designed by someone else, it is useful if there is some way to contact them with questions.
• Does the source use their own forum software? With all the benefits listed above, if a site doesn't use its own design, that may be a sign that it is less than reliable.
• Technical requirements vary from forum to forum, but most require some kind of database such as ASP or MySQL in order to function. If acronyms like that make you nervous, make sure there is someone on your team who can handle the ins and outs of the back-end of your forum.
• Customizable options vary from "none" to complete control over the colors, fonts, images, and sometimes even layouts of the forum. This will require some familiarity with FrontPage by the web site manager.

A reliable and typically up-to-date place to start looking is Microsoft's own web site for FrontPage. It has many free articles, templates, and other useful web tools, as well as links to reputable third-party partners, in case your site gets a budget that is somewhere above "free." Regardless of the source, integrating a forum into your site is the first step to leveraging the truly interactive potential of the web.