two sites or one??

I have recently built an ecommerce site for the candle making industry. (http://www.candlescience.com) As soon as I get an initial PR and my traffic increases I plan on launching a forum (probably phpbb) for my customers to discuss candle making.

Three of my competitors have separate sites for their boards and shopping sites. Other than the increased amount of links between the two does this have an advantage? I personally would rather have it all in one site.

I'd appreciate any input.

Thanks,
mswimm

The separate domain name for message boards seems to be quite a coomon phenomenom. However I've noticed it also goes hand-in-hand with webmasters with very ittle grasp of the technology :-) For example, some people have their forum hosted by the forum software writers (Invision do this I think), either for a fee or for banner adverts on every page. Other people might find that their original hosting service doesn't include hosted databases, etc, and rather than deal with moving the old domain to new servers, just put the forum on the new one.

Things to know:
Most forum software is completely free.
PhpBB is a good one.
They are easy to install, without needing background in php, SQL etc.
If your hosting service includes Cpanel, you can install with around 3 clicks.
Even if you can't host a database, some can work with flat files (store everything as plain text files).

Going back to your original question, I don't actually know for certain :-) but I see no advantage and perhaps the disadvantage of siphoning traffic away from the main site, perhaps lowering the ranking of both.

Thats exactly what I figured. And you are correct about the webmasters, the sites are very poorly built. No one in this industry has much of a PR so I am hoping by combining both the sales and boards I can increase my marketshare. Luckily I have a background in web development so php and mysql are no problem.

Thanks for the advice.

mswimm