How to create an interactive community site in WordPress

If a person is keen to create an interactive community website, he should make sure that the content is top-notch, the website itself is easy to use & browse through and most importantly it should be interactive while serving the intended purpose. Good, unique and engaging content helps to draw a number of visitors to a website but the website should be constructed and maintained in such a way that, there is regular inflow of steady traffic. Frequent update is one option, but the most viable and sought after way to ensure communication with the audience is to add WordPress plugins.

WordPress plugins to the rescue :

According to a survey, community websites that interact with its audience are most likely to have much more followers than those that are rather introvert and static. Interactions not only create a bond with the readers, but also help the community website to gain immense popularity within a rather short duration. For WordPress websites, there are a spectrum of useful plugins that can be extremely helpful to give a website an interactive edge.

Contact plugins – A contact plugin is simple yet effective. It asks the readers to simply put down their name, contact information and their query, so that the community can respond back to their feedback, queries or grievances. In this way by responding back, a community can help their audience & let them know that their views matter and that they are all ears.

Q&A pluginsA Q&A WordPress plugin lets visitors post questions which the community or the community owner can answer. The correspondence remains public hence, each time a question is answered, other visitors too can learn from the exchange. The Q&A plugins and themes for WordPress are very sophisticated and allow a person to add features to their site such as down and up voting to help rate every answer. These Q&A site also has points based rewards systems to encourage participation. One of the best example of such a plugin is the question answer website like stackoverflow.

Live Chat It is a great tool which one can include to increase interaction with the audience. In this way any queries of the community visitors would be addressed instantly and thus enhance the image of the website.

Discussion ForumsAdding a discussion forum to a WordPress website is a good way to encourage discussion around any content. It is far better than the standard WordPress post comments feature. It is also a great way to answer messages from individual readers, while the rest of the audience can also access and be benefited from it.

These are some of the most important plugins then users should consider when they want to create an interactive community website. If a community website caters to a specific product or service, such an interactive interface would help to create a strong bond with the audience.