The best software to use for a beginning forum is phpBB. It's free, easy to use, and with wide support. The next best step is the paid VBulletin, however, it may not be necessary.

In this we'll go through the steps of setting up a forum on a website.

Step 1: Fantastico. If you have a host that provides CPanel, you have an icon that looks like a blue smiley face; this is Fantastico, and is an easy way to install programs with just a few clicks. Click on it, and select phpBB from the left. Select the home directory or a sub directory if you want to put it in, say, yourdomain.com/forum. Select a username and password and email, and click install and then finish installation. Now, if you don't have CPanel, your host may still offer one click installs of phpBB; you'll have to ask.

Step 2: Admin screen. OK, go to where you installed phpBB and login with your username and password. Scroll to the bottom and click Administration Control Panel. You'll have to login again.

Step 3: Configure your forum. There are a lot of options you can set here, so let's run through some of the basics. First, click Forums at the top. Then click Manage Forums on the left. In here you can create new subforums and new categories to put those forums in. To create a category, simple click Add New Forum and for forum type select Category. Click Users at the top, and you can set the permission of the people registered at the site among other things. There are many other options here that mostly depend on what you want to do.

Step 4: Seeding. Users are the fuel that fire a forum, but without users you won't be able to get users. Catch 22. You've got to pull your forum up by it's own bootstraps. One way to do this is to get friends, family, yourself, etc to make several posts on the forum to make it look active, and then take out a press release announcing the existence of your forum, at a press release website such as PRWeb.com

Step 5: Time. Time and promotion are what will bring your forum up to speed. Continue seeding your forum, continue taking out press releases. Come up with competitions and other ways of promoting your forum. Get people onto an email list and announce interesting discussion threads to them, etc.