Guests - Part 2
In order to encourage guests to sign up, the forum has to catch the guests eye and make them carry on looking at the site and maybe sign up. The main way to catch the guests attention is to make the forum attractive.
The main ways to do this is as follows:-
- Have a nice looking style. Make sure it is not too bright and not too dark either. If possible try and have more then 1 style available as that can be a good promotional point so when people visit they might think i hate this style although if i sign up i could use their other one instead. Try to stay away from using the soft-wares default forum style as well as these tend to be overused and makes it look like not much time has been spent on the forum by the owner.
- Not have excessive clutter on the index page such as chatrooms/shoutboxes, excessive codes like marques, different colour texts, too many ads, pop-ups and other codes. Anything you do add like affiliates, try to ensure that they are nice and tidy and look clean and not all over the place.
- Have a banner from your site and try to ensure it has your site name. Try not to have it excessively big as people don’t want to always have to scroll down a lot to see the forum. Also ensure that the file size is not too big. The bigger the file size is the longer it takes to load. The longer a site takes to load the less chance guests will sign up as they will get bored of waiting and just move on. The same goes for excessive codes and so on on the index page as that slows the forum load time down also.
- Ensure that the text is easy to read on the site and that your site is cross browser compatible. If you site works in one browser it might not work in others and you could lose a lot of people because the forum looks messed up
- If you use external hosts link imageshack and photobucket for example ensure that the images are always available as sites where images don’t show, expecially the logo or buttons put people of from signing up.
If you follow all these and the things in Part 1 then you should be able to encourage a much larger percentage of guests to sign up to your forum. It does take a lot of work but it is worth it if you want your forum to be successful.