Questions From the Uneducated Monkey!

[setu@adelphia.net]

Hello,

Yeah, so I want to develop a forum in order to promote my business that sells ebooks that I develop.

I have a yahoo website where I sell the ebooks.

I am very new to the forum thing and I have some rookie questions:

1. I am likely to purchase the attetion deficit skins, but I am not sure how it all works. When I purchase the skin, is it self-sufficient? In other words, can I run it separate and then add links (is that the same as "plug-ins?") from my webpage where they can buy my product?

2. What else do I need in order to run the Attention Def skin? I thought I heard I need to have a "server" in order to run the skin from. Is that correct, or when I purchase the skin, does it include the server? Yes, silly questions, I know.

3. If I have to purchase a server, where should I go? Secondly, would my webpage from Yahoo be a server? Would it be sufficient? I have the low-range webpage that runs me about $11 per month.

4. I read that the skin costs 31.00. Is that a one time fee? How much are the updates, and does that occur once per year? Once per month,etc.?

Thanks, and please don't laugh at me!:D

[CustomerService]

Thanks, and please don't laugh at me!:D

I wish you wrote that at the beginning of your post, because I had already laughed! (joking)

1. Think of forums as having three layers. The first layer is the programming, the equivalent of what's under a car's hood. The second layer is the collection of templates, which is the markup so that information and features can be served to visitors. The final later is the "skin", which is the look. All of these function independently - which is to say, you can add a hundred skins to your forum and it only affects the presentation of the data. In short, skins really don't do much expect make your site look pretty. It's the actual forum software that does all the work and provides all the data. Forums do operate independently of your website. How most webmasters do it who run both websites and forums is just to link to the forums from their websites and then also add a link to the website from the forums. To do this, you go into the forum's templates and add the HTML for the link.

2. You need a hosting account, be it shared hosting or dedicated hosting, you need to choose a piece of forum software, e.g. vBulletin, IPB, phpBB, and many more, some of which are free, the best of which, like vBulletin, are not. And that's it.

3. That's up to you to research. Yahoo does offer web hosting accounts, which you probably have. As long as you have access to a MySQL database, you're good to go. I am not sure if you do. You will need to clarify that with Yahoo. I'd recommend choosing a forum software, looking at their software requirements, and then going back to Yahoo and asking them or researching them to find out if they can meet all those requirements. They probably can and do.

4. The answers to these questions are found in the FAQ. In short, purchasing a skin grants one license for one domain forever BUT you only receive free updates and support for a year. If the year goes by and you need to grab an update for the skin, you have to re-purchase it to renew your license, at which point you, of course, get another year.