1. What is an online community? 

An online community is a virtual community whose members interact with each other for common interests primarily via the internet.

 

2. The benefits an online community may offer to members.

 

3. Find a niche (define the purpose & scope) for your online community.

 

4. Set up and grow an email group using Google Group, etc.

 

5. Start a website. The easiest one is a Google Sites. What you need is a Google account. Example:

https://sites.google.com/site/amslerclassroom/Home

(Free if site size <= 100MB; more space for G Suite accounts - with a monthly fee).

 

6. Grow your website with valuable/interesting content, leverage the social media to attract visitors.

 

7. When the daily unique visitors reach 5000 or more (not easy), add a forum to the site to help boost traffic.

•  Build on top of an existing online forum system, such as: 

 

•  Build your own (commercial or open source)

 

8. At some point (over 1,000,000 unique visitors?), you may consider if it makes sense to build (or upgrade to) a more advanced website (using https://wordpress.org/ or something similar).

 

 

9. Keep working on it, bring it to the next level…

 

10. Challenges and Trends

 

https://community.mybb.com/thread-217756.html

 

“IcyBoards Discontinuing All Hosting Services on July 31st, 2018”

 

Trend: Merging all features (of social media, traditional website/forum/email/text, live chat) to one tool?

 

https://www.discourse.org/

 

Be device responsible; go mobile, etc.

 

More information:

https://www.quertime.com/article/15-best-online-forum-platforms-software-free-and-paid/

About the author: David Chen is an IT professional, he can be reached at cinfoshare@gmail.com.