Interested in hearing some best practices from sites that are generating a lot of traffic. I know every community is going to have different criteria, and the general consensus might be "less is more" in this case, but I feel it's worthy of discussion.
On my current production site, I have a custom flash image slider to try and bring attention to important membership deals, published articles or any contests we're running. Below that, I keep a news feed, article feed, forum feed, login box as the top focus, and fill out the remainder of the page with photos, videos, classifieds, business listings, member polls & featured blogs. This to me seems like far too much going on, and having that many design boxes looks cluttered, kind of makes me claustrophobic.
Traffic is pretty light with around 1,200 members and 12-15k monthly page views, but I'm working on a new design before we dump any more $$ into marketing and here's where i've taken it:
Leaving original D7 jquery slider (which I'm not liking due to incompatibility with IE and poor load times), Left (wide) column: 28 most recent members, video that introduces community to our members. Right (narrow) column: Collapsible headers that highlight community features (4 headers, verticle accordian style), and underneath that I have a 'dumbed-down' version of the site spy to show members latest activity.
Thought here is to give new members an appealing look of what is inside, and returning members an easy login to get to the content they are looking for.
So I ask the rest of you, what kind of content are you finding that is just enough for new members to join, but not too much where it puts them into an overload and increases your overall bounce rate?
Forgive me if this has been brought up before, but my search efforts did not bring up any results...
