Cre8asite Forums reach the terrible two’s!
Two years for the Cre8asite forums already? Wow, that seems to have gone pretty quickly.
I’m a bit slow blogging about this, as the anniversary was actually the other day, but a bit of a hectic weekend, including some excellent cricket, followed by some excellent drinking, means I’ve not been in much of a state to blog!
It’s nearer 5 years than 4 now, since I first found Kim and her Cre8pc Yahoo! Club.
At the time I was wanting to find out how I actually got people to visit a site I was designing for a ‘friend’.
Kim’s style and helpfullness hit me straight away, and it became the first, and only ‘forum’ type site that I’ve ever returned to for any decent length of time.
I couldn’t believe how much I learnt about HTML, Search Engines and Web Design in general in the first 6 months of 2000. At a time when I was at a generally very low ebb, with most other aspects of my life really not going very well, my interest in Web Design kicked in and the club gave me something to focus on and keep me going.
Two and a half years later, there was a small group of us, forced off the Yahoo! Clubs and onto their Groups, fed up with the increased advertising shoved in our faces and less intuitive usage. A couple of us suggested getting off Yahoo! and setting up our own forums to carry on the discussions we were having without all that hassle. www.cre8asiteforums.com was born.
It really wasn’t very long before our relatively small ranks were swelled by more people, including some pretty well known names, with respect in the industry. It didn’t seem to take long before we were being recognised as an upcoming powerful resource for the industry as a whole.
Out of a club that was primarily about SEO in it’s infancy, Cre8asite has developed in a broad topic forum, covering pretty much every angle of Web Building and Maintenance possible. All the ingedients for building a successful and effective website are covered under one roof. People like Kim have taken on particular interest in Usability. I’ve picked up on Web Standards and Accessibility. Bill reads just about everything on anything and is ALWAYS able to point you to a useful article or 5.
That I think is the USP of the forums, it’s not a Search Engine forum, though that seems to be where the slight majority of discussion occurs, it’s about the whole caboodle. Holistic is one term that’s been used, some find it odd, but I can’t really think of a better way to describe it. Other than perhaps Douglas Adams’ other way of describing it as “The interconnectedness of all things”.
Read around on the forums and where someone asks a question on a specific subject and how a change might affect that thing, they get an answer, not just about that particular aspect, but also how the change might affect other areas of the whole effectiveness of the site.
Will it improve SE Rank but hamper Usability? Will it be more Usable but hamper ROI?
These are the kind of things the moderators at the forums pick up on so well I find. We’re not just intent on answering your questions, we want to explain why what you’re asking is good/bad, how it will affect the site as a whole, and what other options you may have and the consequences of those options.
As the tagline currently reads we’re trying to get everyone “Building Better Websites, Together”.