Recently I had a meeting with a new client who said he definitely wanted to have a blog on his company’s new website. Only after asking him how he planned to use the blog and how he saw it as a benefit to his site’s users did I discover that what he really needed was a forum. The client wanted users to interact on his site and share questions and answers and ultimately create a community. Both forums and blogs allow you to post and reply to comments but blog posts are primarily on one central topic by one single person. Users can then comment on that blog entry. Forums have content created by several people covering several topics which can then be commented and collaborated on (thus creating a community of users). A forum is a great way to grow user generated content while the blog owner is responsible for generating most of the content.

Forums have existed on the web for quite some time and while blogs have emerged as a popular form of communicating with a website’s users, forums still have huge role in the right application.