Building a Community

[Peter L]

Try to somehow incorporate the benefits on registering.

[azzerom]

I need to be able to see the links first though mate

[Peter L]

The link was posted azzerom.

[Cee Lo Green]

Why not offer some sort of clear incentive for users to sign up? Find out which page your users and guests are landing on the most, and add a banner there with a mini-contest for new users to win $10 as part of a new-user competition or something. It does work on most sites, believe me.

[borkusgod]

I signed up 0x00. One thing I would recommend would be touching up your home tab. Take the links that you have them and move them to another tab. I would use the home tab to right a very blog-style introduction to what the site is and what you want it to be. My first impression after seeing the page was a nice looking chat function with a bunch of random links that seemed to have no rhyme or reason under the home tab. Like others said and incorporating what I mentioned; use the home tab to announce your intentions and give examples and incentives to join the site. Hope this helped a little. It's late here and I'm tired, so I'll read this in the morning and wonder what in the hell I was rambling on about...

[0x00]

Borkus, thanks for you feedback.

Are you suggesting I edit the homepage of the site to a blog-style and add an introduction to the site there, maybe later website news?

The problem is I really need the homepage to have the latest posts, top users, top posts, etc.. without that I am loosing a lot of search engine attention and users wont be able to find the posts easily.

What you suggest makes a lot of sense, people do not seem to understand what the site is about - I asked some friends to check it out and give me feedback, their first response was "Ok, that was a good read.. but what do I do now?" and "Oh I didn't know I could post stuff as well!".

I think I need to rethink the homepage completely or maybe just add a notice on all the land pages (they are mostly the more popular posts) and a link on there to another page with information about the site.

As for incentives to sign up, those never work as well... what happens when the incentive goes? plus people who be signing up only for the $10 / [insert-incentive-here] and that would result in really low quality community. I want peoples interest in the website it self.

Thanks everyone!

[borkusgod]

Now that you mention the search engine, I can see where you're going with that. Perhaps just add another panel above your statistics panel and and write a brief message of what the intent of the website is. I do believe that you could be on to something. A couple of things to bare in mind though. The average internet surfer has the attention span of a fruit fly, if that. The fact that you have people downloading your content does tell you something, however. Most people that create similar sites with get the views with no interaction. You have content on there that people are interested in, and that's a start. I do agree with you that it's very difficult to get users to stay, however. Through the years, I have seen sites that had an avid user base that for whatever reason decided to close and those users decided to create their own and it just didn't pan out. These were people that knew each other well from being on the site for a few years. To make a site that becomes popular and stays that way is a bit like playing the lottery. There is no doubt that hard work and forethought are critical, but I have seen people use that to the full extent and still not be able to keep a user base. So with that, don't give up. Put all you have into this one, but if it doesn't pan out, give it a go on another and learn from this one. But to come back to what I was originally saying, it's important to have the purpose of the site and some navigation tips for the browser that lands on your page. It's one thing to email your friends and tell them to check it out or to post here where we have your thread to get an idea of what we are looking for and can ask you questions if need be. But, like you said you are depending largely on search engine hits and these people come and if they don't like what they see or can't figure it out without scrolling down the page, they bounce. Hope that made sense.