The Floor Pro Community is a HIT!

[TFP Admin]

I am very pleased with the great turnout we have had in our first week. It has kept me so busy that I am a day and a half late with this first weekly report. We have handed out some staff appointments, fixed a graphics and login problem and have stepped up to the plate for our members in any way we could to provide an interesting and secure site to mingle and network with other floor covering pros.

For a brand new forum in a specialized category and only some emailed invitations and word of mouth advertising our statistics are impressive. We have 65 members with 38 of them posting 74 threads and 582 messages. That's a lot of typing. And it doesn't count the Private Messaging and secure email feature of TheFloorPro Community forums. We have one of the most modern and feature packed forum packages, vBulletin. We have combined it with a portal system, vBadvanced, that gives us a nice home page and preview of The Floor Pro Community happenings. It will also allow us to add pages easily to offer our members and visitors more resources in articles, reviews and possibly even interviews with industry leaders, all in the same beautiful interface given to us by ForumTemplates.com and enhanced by customized graphics by an anonymous donor.

Our members have proved that this site is run by them. We have been put to task for a cluttered forum display, a login glitch, a graphics rendering problem and several small issues that have all been resolved. The floor covering professionals that make up our fine community have welcomed and in most cases recommended their own leaders, a small group of dedicated flooring pros who have spent many years giving the highest quality service to consumers and clients and also now volunteer time to their peers.

It has been an exciting week for me. A new forum usually takes months of planning and many hours of coding and uploading software and content pages. Most forum sites take a long time to get going especially when there is no budget for advertising and marketing. Many a floorcovering business has started just like this. Some fail quickly, some slowly. Some are grand successes and some rely on luck, coincidence, tenacity or just a bunch of people who want a change. Maybe we have a little bit of all that but the website and forums came to life in a matter of 2 short days with no advanced planning or notice and have been member driven ever since.

TheFloorPro Community itself is responsible for the early successes and it appears they will continue to feed it the time and energy to fuel it for at least a while longer. It has the potential to be the largest and most popular site for the floorcovering professional. I will try to keep you posted on its growth, including the trials and tribulations every new venture experiences.

Thanks to all the members for making this a labor of love for me.