Should my new forum go in the root of my domain or a subdirectory?

[Johnny5]

I recently bought a domain name that was so expensive I actually consulted my girlfriend about whether I should take the plunge. After convincing her (and myself) that I wasn't crazy and buying it (although in hindsight I think I was), I told her my plans for the site.

Let's say it's sailing.org, which it's not. I told her that I was going to put a forum at the root of the domain so that when people visit the site they see a forum. She thinks it is a big mistake and that the home page should be... something else. I don't know anything about sailing myself, so coming up with "stuff" will be difficult. However, she thinks the site will be more of an authority if it's not "just" a forum because when people want answers or to learn they often don't want to have to ask questions or sift through other people's conversations.

If the site were sailing.org, would you recommend putting the forum in the root so that the entire site were centered around the forum, or would you put it in a subdirectory so that the forum was just one aspect of a greater sailing site and then struggle to create "valuable" content for the rest of the site?

If you did put the forum in a subdirectory, that path would be in every url to the forum, so what would you call it? Would it have consequences for SEO?

Here are some subdirectory names I was thinking of:

sailing.org/forum (I can't see the word forum helping much unless people searched for "sailing forum", but I'd want people who searched for "sailing" as there would be many more of them)
sailing.org/talk
sailing.org/discuss
sailing.org/community
sailing.org/sailing-forum

I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts and any advice you have on the matter.

Thanks!

[briansol]

All my forums run in root.

I think running out of root when 99.9% of your site is the forum is a HUGE mistake.


Even if you want a homepage later, you can fake it with vbseo.

rename index.php to forum.php and do the vb admin changes to reflect that.
then CRR forumphp -> forums/
then use the custom template (i outlined how to build one on my privacy policy tutorial) and save it as index.php.