Decide upon a niche to target with your community. This is harder than it sounds, and creating a forum that is similar in theme to existing and well established forums is a bad idea. Very few people will leave their current forum to move to your new, small forum. Many people have invested lots of their time into a forum, and they will not give that all up just to join your forum.
Find some other people that are interested in building the community with you. Having some people working with you will make things a lot better, and you will be able to support each other when the going gets tough.
Decide on the theme, and find some friends that are interested in working with you on your new community, you will need to decide on a hosting plan for the forum, i.e. where to host the website that the forum will be on. There are many free forum hosting providers, however, they will give you a subdomain, such as (your forum name).freeforums.org, which may look unprofessional. Alternatively, you can purchase a domain name and hosting from a web host.
Select which forum software you want to use. This is often the most important decision during the creation of the forum, as it can be hard to switch to a different forum software without losing all your existing forum posts. SMF (simple machines forum) is free, and has very few public exploits, meaning it is very secure and is unlikely to be hacked. Other popular forum software includes vBulletin, MyBB and phpBB.
Know that installation instructions will be different depending on which forum software you choose, but in most cases, you will have to download and unzip the forum software after downloading it, upload it into the publicly accessible directory of your web server via FTP, and then create a MySQL database for it (ask your hosting provider for instructions on this). The MySQL database is where forum posts and member information will be stored.
Have the forum up and running on your webspace, you can create the boards for the forum (where forum threads will be posted in). Initially, keep to a maximum of maybe 10 boards. Do not have too many off-topic discussion areas, just one 'general discussion' area will do initially.
Know that before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, so that visitors to the site, and new users, will have somewhere to post. Many new forum users are too shy to post new threads on their own.
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