Cars, Vehicles, Motorcycles

Cupara

Well-known member
Yes the title is lame but here is the thing, I'm thinking of starting a car site as I'm into cars heavy, I love classics at that. But a lot of car sites only pertain to say sports cars, a specific type, but I was thinking of having a site that pertained to cars from around the world, sports cars, classics, upcoming cars, etc.

What I want to know is what do others expect from a car site when they go looking for a car community to join?

Also if you want, those who have an idea can suggest site names as I'm not decided on that. Unfortunately I may have to go with a free forum software for it which kinda sucks, wanted to use XenForo for it.

Anyway, look forward to hearing what others have to say.
 
What I want to know is what do others expect from a car site when they go looking for a car community to join?
I would rather say what type of car site I would join, rather than what I expect to find on existing forums.

I would join an automotive forum of some type if the important information was reasonably well documented, and questions could be asked by people - that were new to the forum - and reasonable answers might be obtained. Specifically what happens is acronyms are over used, and it seems to take far too long to decipher.

But typically what I find is that the important items are either buried in an extremely long sticky thread where post #1 was not up to date, or some type of front page that did not explain things well enough.

Another issue is perspective. One forum I joined kept going on and on about great or terrible the 'traction' was on various tires. I was quite confused until I realized that they were referring to traction at the race track. Whereas I was seeking information about finding reasonable tires for a reasonable price for someones car who had an oddball size tire (which is why the general tire sites did not help).
 
I think one of the big problems you'll have, is that cars in different countries are different.

Classic example was the Ford Focus - in Europe it was replaced by a proper generation 2 product, in the USA Ford kept selling an older model with tweaks.

Everything from the chassis, styles/bodies, kit, equipment, engines, trim levels etc... can and will be different from country to country. So I think it's really difficult to appeal to wide audiences.

I have to admit, I was previously a member of a UK Ford Focus forum - it had lots of useful information, and there were people from part suppliers etc.. on there which helped to make it even more useful. So I think there's perhaps a reason people have often focused on specific cars/makes for car forums in the past! I probably wouldn't have joined a more generic car forum, as it would have lacked that expertise.
 
When I say Classic, I don't mean Ford Focus classic, I mean 57' Chevy classic.

That is where I want to make my site different, easy to navigate, easy to find answers to questions, especially on first posts that need to be updated. See I plan to have the forum separate into US, UK, etc so to keep things organized and straight. I plan to have an addon that will allow users to say hide all of the US forums and keep UK open or close all forums and keep Germany forums open to them at all times so to keep confusion from happening.
 
For the record, I own a 1987 vehicle (extra vehicle for occasional use). Certainly not a classic but parts get getting tough to find.. Some suppliers may be willing to pay you for advertising if there was a group that frequented your forum, as opposed to the typical adsense ads. Far more lucrative, but more work.

Just a thought.
 
I have a moto type forum which is a very tiny niche about a very specific brand.

One thing you could do is to create stickers. If you wanted to specialize in brand X, 25 to 50 years old, then if your forum was called retroXtalk.com (retro meaning 25-50 years old) then you could create a sticker that said retroXtalk.com on it.

Then locate parts suppliers that specialize in those types of parts, and send them some stickers to put on their counter. That will create interest. But you need to be careful cull out only the good parts suppliers, otherwise they will attempt to spam your forum.

Eventually there will be enough interest where those types of things are not needed, and sponsors will find you - but doing that is a *lot* of work. You will also find that your typical forum member may not be high tech, and will need special help in simply joining your forum. In return you may find that those people are quite loyal to you.
 
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