Joe Ward

I just visited a forum and noticed something interesting. See attached.

The user has vBAdvanced CMPS on their homepage.

Even though we use vBA here at vBSEO.com, I'm still not a big fan. Its rigid style just does not look great. Quite often it's hard to visually lock-in on anything due to an excess of ugly little modules like useless calendars and other link "boxes".

But this designer did something cool:

http://www.vbseo.com/blogs/joe-ward/...ing-forums.gif

They blew up their "Forums" link to about +4 sizes.

RESULT: I saw it instantly.

So - while you may or may not be a fan of this site's template... they are successful in making sure you knew where their forum is located.

I visit hundreds of forums every month. It's frustrating when I get to a site with a homepage (vBA powered or otherwise) and I cannot find the forum link. I know the forum is there. I'm looking for it and I'm having trouble.

Imagine what that means for the casual web visitor who lands on the site...

We're really talking micro-seconds here. You have to make sure your users find whatever they are looking for (or whatever you want them to look at) quickly... or you will lose them.

Sometimes it takes several seconds to find the forum link. As you can imagine, that is definitely not going to help make your traffic sticky or boost your member conversions.

Take a look at this site:
http://www.tnagaming.org

Browsing around a bit, you will see that they are pretty good at drawing attention to stuff, including their PayPal donation status.

The key takeaways here are:

• Step 1. Make sure you know which stuff is most important to your users
• Step 2. Make sure your visitors can find it with their eyeballs... in microseconds... on every page on your site preferably!
• Step 3. Make sure your assumptions in Step 1 about "what" is most important to your visitors is correct. How do you know? Test it... move stuff around... see how it impacts your member conversion, posting activity, etc.