Hi All,

I am in the process of building a site with Coffeecup.

As you probably know they don't have a forum solution but mention free ones on the net. They are fine except for 2 things:

1. They don't look great - generally they look, well, free!
2. They don't count for SEO.

Any suggestions of good ones that I can customise and attach?

Also, re blogs, any suggestions? Is COffeecup solution any good?

Thanks,
Derek.

Have you had a look at this one?

http://www.forumotion.com/

I run a painting forum with some other artists, we used the above to create the forum. Easy to use, and it allows for a lot of customization. Our forum comes up on the first page of Google results for our key words.

The CC Blogger software is easy to use, easy to customize and of course, easy to add to your site - But, it doesn't have a comments feature. If feedback on your blog is important, than you'll need a different blog software. Although you could include a contact form on the page with your blog. You'd be able to get feedback, but it wouldn't be automatically displayed with your blog.

smf forums are very good looking and seo friendly from what I've seen also

I am also a fan of SMF. It is easy to admin and updates are as easy as a click of a button. It also has a Project Honeypot plugin to combat known spammers that works great. I have replaced PHPBB3 with SMF for all my forum needs.