New Staff?

[Peter L]

Mindless discussion is what most of the internet is made of. But I think we have more than one interesting thread per week. You've personally made a couple hundred threads which upon review are very high quality imho. And you're just one member.

That was my original point, me and members like myself are the minority.

Unfortunately you have a point and I'm shamed to admit that but I will. We do need something here. I just gotta figure out what it is exactly. I knew removing the SF Award though would force me into action on that cause. I think we're ready for a new chapter in SF. We do have the natural traffic from search engines I've always wanted. The issue now is bounce rate. We're just not interesting enough for first time visitors to join. I need to figure out why.

Our SEO btw is very good. We rank very well for a variety of topics. I'll be examining it more closely though. I am imho very good at SEO analysing.

You're very prone to having very calm, basic themes for your forums. They don't look bad, but nothing stands out. Perhaps a new theme can be arranged, we have many themes designers here and I would assume you have many contacts with the bigger designers such as Audentio. Design is the first thing people look at, obviously.

And if you don't want to do that, another idea would be to have a News bar at the top, similar to MyBB.com. Just a simple, color-contrasting bar that gives members/guests updates on the forum. It gives a social and lively feel to any forum which is what Support Forums needs. Even adding social networking buttons like twitter/facebook somewhere will give the forum a more modern and approachable feel. Then people will sign-up and realize the community is a thing to love. Currently I'd bet over 60% of traffic from Google don't give the website much of a chance because they are turned off in general. Big changes (a new theme) and little changes (a news bar) will change that.