8 Ways To Start a Q&A Site with WordPress

Yahoo! Answers and Linkedin Q&A are two exciting services that you can use to find the answers to your questions or help others with their needs. Those sites cover a wide array of topics. You can always create a similar type of website around your own niche using WordPress. It’s possible using both plugins and themes. There are also a few third party services that webmasters can take advantage of to implement these types of websites. Interested? Here are 8 easy ways to create your own Q&A website with WordPress:

Q&A WordPress Themes:

Perhaps the best way to start your own Q&A website. These themes can manage your questions and answers and help you build a stronger community around your website:

Askit: a slick WordPress theme for Q&A websites. It has 7 color schemes for you to choose from. Its user reputation system is pretty solid too.

Instant Q&A: perhaps the best Q&A theme on the market (at the time of this writing). It’s clean, very dynamic, and designed with your community in mind. Your visitors gain points by participating in your community, which is a nice feature to have.

Q&A Theme: a clean answers theme for WordPress. It is easy to set up and lets you build a community around your favorite topic. It lets you import questions from Yahoo! Answers.

Answers Theme: designed for dedicated Q&A websites. It has multiple color schemes and a pretty clean design. You can have your blog on the side using this theme.

Questions & Answers Plugins:

Should you use a plugin to get the job done? It really depends on your situation. Plugins are easier to use than themes and let you integrate Q&A forums into your existing website. With that said, here are 3 Q&A plugins worth checking out:

WP-Answers: a premium plugin for WordPress that turns your website into a Q&A site. It also grabs the latest questions from Yahoo! Answers to make your site look busy.

WP Answers: it essentially turns your comments into a Q&A system. Your visitors can vote comments up and down.

Question and Answer Forum: does not make drastic changes to your website, but it does let you use short-codes to create the Q&A section for your website.

ChaCha Answers: you can use this plugin to integrate questions from ChaCha into your website. Latest questions asked can be displayed too.

Bonus

Urtak: not exactly a Q&A solution for WordPress, but it does allow you to integrate Yes/No surveys into your website (any platform) and allows your visitors to ask their own questions.

Have you got any suggestions?