Modifications to make it easier

[Shawn Gossman1]

Making it easier to join, login, post, and engage on the community can help you retain more members to returning members.

Is this something you try to do on your own community?

Do you make it easier to use the community?

Is yes, please give me some examples of what you're doing to make using your community easier for members?

 

[ClicketyKat]

Here's what I've noticed after years of being on forums but also after inviting friends who don't visit forums to give an objective opinion... forums can be too overwhelming to those not used to visiting them often.

Is it a generational thing? I know that people 50 and above (luckily this doesn't include me even though I'm in that age range) have a tendency to shy away from exploring sites and utilizing tools on sites. That could mean, they won't change the site theme, they don't pay attention to links in text type, they see too much in their face all at once and it's new to them.

Does that mean we need to make our sites boring? No, but we should be looking at our sites with fresh eyes and see what could prohibit someone from joining who isn't used to the forum world. That could be limiting now many of the sub-forums are showing except the names (don't give the data underneath for stats).

I've noticed that the Help that's generally included in the Terms and rules is natural for those of us who use Xenforo to find. But unless you are on forums, how do you know that?

Now, I know that some of the sites I run aren't even following my own advice that's listed above, but I'm slowly trying to convince others we need to remember the non-techies and the non-forum peeps when we make changes to the sites.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

I've noticed that the Help that's generally included in the Terms and rules is natural for those of us who use Xenforo to find. But unless you are on forums, how do you know that?

I'm a big fan of deleting the help section and making your own help pages for all features using your own words and screenshots.

What do you think? Do you feel that would be helpful to those who just don't know?

You could feature help pages in your forum news section weekly too to teach others how to do things.

 

[ClicketyKat]

I'm a big fan of deleting the help section and making your own help pages for all features using your own words and screenshots.

What do you think? Do you feel that would be helpful to those who just don't know?

You could feature help pages in your forum news section weekly too to teach others how to do things.

I agree that the Help section should be in member's faces. Especially if you have some very distinct rules or things pertaining to sizes for signatures that you expect people to follow. If they don't see it, they aren't going to abide by it.

 

[Shawn Gossman1]

I agree that the Help section should be in member's faces. Especially if you have some very distinct rules or things pertaining to sizes for signatures that you expect people to follow. If they don't see it, they aren't going to abide by it.

Yeah.

I probably should do something for signatures and sizing.

Your banner is a good size. Maybe I’ll use that as a start.

 

[ClicketyKat]

Yeah.

I probably should do something for signatures and sizing.

Your banner is a good size. Maybe I’ll use that as a start.

The 728x90 is a normal banner ad size and what I was thinking when I was at Promotion Future was to encourage all members to have a banner that size. Then we'd have contests where someone could win advertising space and it would have been easy to grab their banner and put it up. But, not all members realized my plan so they stuck with their smaller banners they used elsewhere.