I'm using Site Designer v5 for my website www.industrialandons.com. As the support folks at CoffeeCup can attest, I'm a barely functional user.
I do not use S-Drive and push my builds to my hosting platform.
From some of the current SERP research I've done it looks like it might be good to have a blog associated with my website. Or maybe a forum, sort of like this which would be more interactive.
With that in mind, have others done this? How did you do it? Was it just a link to a different platform or something actually on your site?
Thank you!

It can be done either way but depending on how you want the forum or blog to interact could make it difficult to use site designer as it is without using custom coding.
If you was to use it as a blog type of setup where it was mostly articles or question and answers for example without much user interaction then it's reasonably easy using site designer as it is straight from the box so to speak.
What framework are you using?
Foundation
Bootstrap 4
Materialize
Frameworkless

Hi again
I see that you are using the Foundation framework so no need answer the last part of my question.

There are quite a few things that you can do with regard to SEO (search engine optimisation) BEFORE embarking upon adding a blog, to be honest there isn't that much benefit from adding a forum type of thing, and even possibly an interactive blog thingy too as far as SEO is concerned, and there is a security issue especially with blogs in so much as it requires some additional measures and linking thingies to try preventing the nasty people from placing malware etc etc, NOT IMPOSSIBLE but difficult, and also will require a lot of maintenance updating etc etc or a very regular basis (if not daily). Perhaps your better option would be to correct some of the basic errors on your website that MAYBE causing a lack of SEO optimisation opportunities.

Just a quick investigation shows there are 4 issues, 12 warnings and 13 opportunities to fix some serious errors throughout your website.
You have duplicated pages (content and addresses
WITHOUT a Canonicial declaration

Pages that are identical to each other using the MD5 algorithm which calculates a 'hash' value for each page and can be seen in the 'hash' column. This check is performed against the full HTML of the page. It will show all pages with matching hash values that are exactly the same. Exact duplicate pages can lead to the splitting of PageRank signals and unpredictability in ranking.

How To Fix
There should only be a single canonical version of a URL that exists and is linked to internally. Other versions should not be linked to, and they should be 301 redirected to the canonical version.

One such example for instance,, your page title
"HOME PAGE" is a really poor title (sorry to be blunt) for SEO purposes
your home page description is once again very poor for SEO purposes.

These are things you should be addressing first before even attempting something like a blog or forum.

It would also be one of my recommendations to ass the G4 Analytics thingy from Google, to youe website pages,, this will give you a greater in-site into what user interaction is occurring on your website, where there could be improvements made, errors fixed etc etc.

Last but not least a cookie declaration and privacy policy at the very least (like it or not something like that is in some parts of the world and determinately in all states of the USA (US Privacy Law Update - Montana Privacy Law will become Active on October 1st for example) It is also a good idea to include a site usage terms and conditions policy too just to cover you own delicate bits, that some of those nasty people like to try and kick you in.
Those are not really SEO requirements but do play a small role.

I can help with some of the things to look at and fix first if you want (there are others on this forum too who can and will) HOWEVER IT WOULDN"T BE WISE TO PUT THAT ON THIS TYPE OF OPEN FORUM, so a one to one thingy, is better, you can email me from the link below in my signature (the simple quick one would be better for that)

Salut Robert ,

Personally for a forum or a blog we find on the net 'free' forums and blogs of which the best known is: phpBB.

But there are hundreds of other free ones on the web, you have nothing to program, only with basic knowledge of CSS and Html: you only redo the look of the forum to your needs and your tastes. there are even free templates too.

As you have your own server, in your management space of your site, your host should even offer you several types of forum ready to be installed. Or else you look on the web the one that will suit you and you will install it on your server that you currently use.

Personally this is what I do..

I haven't used phpBB for at least 20 years, and back then they looked pretty drab. I just had a look at them now, and with the different themes they actually look much nicer. The phpBB is the easiest to set up among the couple of others I've used, so I'll support what Christy says.

I appreciate everyone's input and feedback. I wasn't getting response notifications and just now finally thought to double check. Sounds like the forum won't do much for me and I have some other bigger issues to address on my site. I appreciate "Its A Kind of Bali Magic's" blunt feedback. I copied and pasted a lot of containers as I built the page which apparently isn't a great idea, especially if it was a header container. I will go through everyone's notes now that I see them.
Thank you!