How best to do this?

[aurictitan]

Hi guys,

My new site will initially have only a forum to start out with. But later on, I will add a homepage that will contain some articles published by me. My forum will be phpbb3 and the article section that comes later on will be wordpress based. I want the visitors to see my forum first when they type in www.mydomain.com until I have my article section ready and after that I want the wordpress article section to be my homepage. I am wondering how best it would be to approach this(taking into account SEO too). Will it be sufficient that I install wordpress on my domain root now and phpbb3 on a subfolder called 'forums' and then use a 301 redirect to http://www.mydomain.com/forums until I have the section ready. Is this the best way to do it? is there any other way?

[jamesc06]

You could use a simple php redirect on your homepage, then just remove it when youre ready. Just remove all html tags and add this. Replace domain with desired URL -- use the full path

<?php
$test = false;
  if($test == 0){
    header('Location: insertdomainhere);
  }
?>

[trishacupra]

Are you absolutely sure you want to start with the forum? Personally, I would start with the WordPress blog first and get regular comments, then create a forum. I'll try to clearly explain why.

It's hard work to build a forum, and it's very obvious if it's new and has very little participation.

On the other hand, if you start with writing interesting, conversation-starting articles in WordPress and asking for comments, you start with some interesting content on your home page and it's not too embarrassing if it takes a while before you start getting many comments.

Once you have a good amount of people commenting on your posts, then you can start a forum.

That is the plan I'm working on myself at the moment. So I'm not talking from experience as I'm still in the process. But I've seen other forums being born and then dying pretty quickly due to nobody posting.

[Black Max]

Are you absolutely sure you want to start with the forum? Personally, I would start with the WordPress blog first and get regular comments, then create a forum.

Trish is right, to my mind. I generally agree with Trish anyway, except when I don't

A forum in a vacuum makes little sense. A forum is for discussing whatever the site's focus is.