FordForumsOnline.com vBulletin 3.8 to xenForo Case Study

http://www.fordforumsonline.com

Was excited when I stumbled across this forum for sale. Picked it up today and have everything moved over. I want to make this a case study for vBulletin -> xenForo conversion so I will be updating this thread with the results over time.

So lets get this started with some current analytics:



Goals are to get bounce rate down and increase pageviews, which will probably take a bit of a hit on the initial conversion.

Currently we have about 50 members that log in over 24 hours. Goal is to get to 100 within 6 months of conversion to xenForo.

Time frame to convert to xenForo will be as soon as http://xenmediagallery.com/ 1.3 is released with the vBulletin Album importer.

Look forward to tracking the progress of this site. Most of you know I started a Ford Mustang site as my first one and recently sold it. Glad to be back in my favorite niche.

 

Screenshot of it as of now.

.

 

Changed the default guest theme (members still have the one above they are used to. Mostly did this because there were a few broken links and also to make sure that all advertisements from the previous owner are gone.

 

xenForo will take care of that.

Also, some of those forums at the bottom will be removed / consolidated before the switch over.

 

I got lucky and was up at 2AM when I saw the site and quickly made an offer.

 

It had over 30 bids and had been up on Flippa for less than 24 hours. I was really surprised when he took my first offer.

 

You should put in a request for Photoplog importer on xenmediagallery.com

He plans importers for after 1.3 release. We used Photoplog on MustangEvolution as well.

 

The first thing that was done after purchasing it was put it on a default basic vBulletin style. The one that was being used was a mess and had broken links and funky pages.

Our next step is to convert it to xenForo. The sooner the better as there are so many advantages to xenForo when it comes to increasing user engagement, both built in and 3rd party.

After our xenForo conversion we will have a new look and then we will simply put some of the best practices in that I have learned over the years running forums. We have add-ons that we use on all xenForo sites and a certain way we configure each one.

We are also working on a port of a nice Mailchimp newsletter setup that the previous owner was using on vBulletin to send out detailed newsletters. You can view it here: http://www.fordforumsonline.com/forum/output_email.php

 

It is on the to do list. I need to stop launching new forums and finding others to buy. Taking up all my time right now.

 

Converted to xenForo http://www.fordforumsonline.com/