Showcase your landing page

[StarbucksCoffee]

Don't judge a book by its cover, but yet, most of us all do (including myself).​

The landing page is incredibly important for the first impression when visiting a website. Personally, when a landing page looks outdated in design, I already have mixed feelings about it.

Creating a landing page for your forum can be a tough job. What is it that you will highlight? What features will you show off, and how do you make users click on that shiny sign-up button?

I made this thread to give everyone their chance to show off their landing pages and maybe with a brief explanation of why you decided to go forward with that design.

 

[Page]

The option is for you to click on my link and see my landing home page and give me your thoughts right away?

 

[Moonface]

I'd argue that everyone would have their landing page linked in their respective promotion threads to be seen. Same for the Directory. Or as Empire said, some people have it in their signatures too.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I keep my landing page as my forum index.

The only time I would have something different would be for a blog. And then the blog would have to be updated at least on a weekly basis. I'd also have to show widgets to display the forum information in most cases.

I usually just stick with the forum as the main page, though.

 

[Page]

forum index.

Aren't a bad idea, you want your main forum page to get as much traffic as you can, most people look at the home page and then goes away LOL

 

[Deleted member 4320]

I'd say that 99% of forums here use their forum index, the 1% usually have a portal as the front. The content is the forum, having a weird 'landing page' is a bit weird.

 

[StarbucksCoffee]

Based on all the comments I see that many prefer the forum index, or a customized forum index with widgets.

I might have been too long in the corporate environments where we create intranets with lots of pages, including a landing page.

Besides landing pages, I’ve some customized XF login and register pages that I made, I’ll share this later today.

 

[Katrina]

Based on all the comments I see that many prefer the forum index, or a customized forum index with widgets.

I might have been too long in the corporate environments where we create intranets with lots of pages, including a landing page.

Besides landing pages, I’ve some customized XF login and register pages that I made, I’ll share this later today.

I think you're right that only really large sites need to have a landing page for ease of organization of all they have to offer.

 

[StarbucksCoffee]

I think you're right that only really large sites need to have a landing page for ease of organization of all they have to offer.

Yes. The organizations I worked with had a huge amount of content for which we created a separate intranet. Because of this, you really need to have a landing page to introduce the intranet and its features. Also, special oath login was required with the usage of corporate VPN, etc.

I've to admit that it was pretty cool to create these things, but you always need to keep in mind that there are users in the organization who're not familiar with forum platforms, which is why you need to have everything well written and use clear communication on a landing page.

For smaller forums, like a forum for Tesla drivers or All-Apple forums, you can have a forum index with some widgets. "Why should you join this forum? What can you find here?" etc.

Aren't a bad idea, you want your main forum page to get as much traffic as you can, most people look at the home page and then goes away LOL

I also agree that users might leave a website when there is a landing page with a lot of information. Instead of scrolling through a whole landing page, some users want to see what the forum offers straight away, which a forum index does exactly.