I always have problems creating a home page for my social websites. I do not want to show journal as it displays right now. I use AS and UVG on my websites. Any idea what I should do for my home page?

I want to use the mini registration on the home page but we don't have it right now. Any ideas what I should do?

Thanks for your time.

Frozen...shoot me a few links and I'll be happy to give you some ideas. Personally, I'm going to move away from the activity stream front and center...at least the full blown one. The plan is to show latest members, rides, trails, posts, articles, blogs, etc....and a summary stream (with the new "Everyone" security this will be easier).

I'm finding that our community is just one part of the site and many visitors are joining but not participating in the community....I need to diversify my homepage content and will move my current summary into a "Community" tab.

I am in the same boat and in my discussions with Steven I have decided two things. 1. Diversify my home page and 2. Only use Community Forums and not have a separate Forum.

I am in another community online and it uses Community Server with access to Forums through Groups and other navigation options. And honestly as familiar as I am with the content and with Group and Forum interaction I find myself getting mixed up quite a bit as to the location of certain content. I will let the community I am building help me decide if additional forums are needed outside of the Group Forums.

I hope to pull all of this together in the next couple of weeks, so I will provide a link then.

I have been debating the same thing.  Content, marketing(information), or both on the home page?  I am leaning toward marketing for our portal.  Of course the answer really varies based on the visitor and portal type.  We have 11 different main features of the site (if you count forums, groups, and social profile individually) and some are self explanatory to our user base (social stuff, school, forums, q and a, etc.) while others are less so (brokerage account statistics sharing, user reviews details, etc.)  So, for users that are just visiting the site, I would like to provide them with an overview of available content with nice visual aids to make it easy to comprehend all the features at a glance.  They are free to click menu tabs to visit most areas of the site unauthenticated if they choose to do so.  Authenticated users will have been made familiar with the features already, so I want to present them with more relevant content.  For our initial release, hitting the home page will simply redirect them to their profile area, with no centralization of site content available.  After our first release we will work on a dashboard to act as the first tab (visible to account owner only) in the active social profile tabs, and the dashboard will show things like latest forum posts, etc. - whatever we deem as most relevant based on user activity at the time.

There is a rule of thumb that says you should be able to explain to a new user what your site does for them in three major points. Link to a demo, sign up, etc. All for new visitors. For members the rule is a portal page that puts all of your major features within a click from their main page.

As I mock up some ideas for my site I'll be happy to share here.

I spent months on this and still not happy (http://www.pokerdiy.com) - in the end I used the CodeSlider and Jquery (just an HTML mod) to show the 3 key areas of my site with some nice screenshots. I then add a bit of stuff for SEO (but I want it quick loading so want to use AJAX tabs instead of clientside tabs - its a balance between SEO/usability).

Once you log in, a lot of stuff is hidden and all my Latest 10 ten items appear as well as the journal (like a Dashboard) - I have way too much stuff to fit it all on the profile page.

But still not happy with it... I think home page design is a complete art

There is no question that the Home Page design is critical. One site I am working on took me about a year of design/redesigning the home page until I was happy with it.

I don't know how you guys do it but what works for me is to create a mockup in Fireworks or Photoshop and then keep playing with it until it looks exactly how I want it to look. Only after that is all done do I even start on the software itself.

The art of home page design is to show everything that is available on the site in a layout that appears to be simple and not confusing or overwhelming to the eye.

That's why it is so difficult to do it well.

I had thought about a row of three or four content areas across the top (just below the main menu) to highlight my areas, but I want people to read the announcements and not just jump right into a specific area.

I find that using the whats new module works out great for my home page announcements. I also made a custom "Featured" content control to direct users at content I want them to be aware of right now. It's not fancy but does funnel users more than if I didn't have it. I try to make sure the Featured content has something from several areas (ie. Forum Topic, File Area, Article, etc)

I also need to get the social aspect more in gear but the way my site is heavily customized around embedding music and videos, I need certain changes in AS/AF before I can really kick it into high gear.

I have also found that having a HELP menu is a benefit for a lot of users. They will often use it before getting too frustrated. My first Help sub item is an about page (About Warbeats) that gives the lowdown on my five main areas.

You can see my site here: http://warbeats.com

Please post your sites, the few I have seen (Steven and Frozen) have given me some good ideas for changes on my own site.

My website's Home page is no longer what it was because of the template changes to the AS system. The old new groups, new members and recent activity template no longer work so I had to take them down.

Home pages are so difficult. I am looking at the Yahoo Groups home page. I want to do something like that but then we cannot just put the search groups box and categories alone, or can we?

Thanks for the offer, Steven. I will PM you the links.

No pressure, Steven. I just want to make sure you got my PM.

Does anyone know any social websites with good home pages so we can steal some ideas?

Got it and replied....

Wow! Thanks! I hope you did not exhaust yourself by writing that long reply.



Please let me know when you get time. Thanks again.