It's no secret that our homepage currently leaves much to be desired. We don't have all that much content there, which appears to lead to a high bounce rate (i.e. people finding us, visiting the site, and leaving shortly after). We've neglected it, and I think it's high time we work on it.
I've been playing around with SMF's website integration functionality, and so far I came up with the idea of listing the most recently updated threads in the sidebar (which is currently cluttered by largely unhelpful blog stuff). Mind you, this is just a quick draft, but instead of this:
we could have this:
(Currently, I have this set to display only threads from Announcements, FEG, FEQ&A and FED of my dev forum, but this can obviously be changed)
While on the subject of tying the homepage together with the forum, this could also open another avenue. Currently, we rely on a blogging CMS that only Parsifal and I have direct access to. Obviously, this is not ideal since it needlessly stops our members from directly contributing (see: the fact that we only published one of Pongo's two proposed posts, for no real good reason). We could, for example, have a News board here which would allow some pre-approved members to post directly to the home page.
We could also explore areas for integrating the home page with our Wiki, e.g. "Flat Earth image of the week" (this could be randomly picked from a selection of images we mark as good), a link to a random article, or something along those lines.
All in all, I'm looking for opinions on the ideas I've had so far, as well as any other ideas you might have for improving our homepage. Do you think the links to recent posts in the sidebar might be useful to a newcomer? Would people be interested in writing an occasional paragraph for the homepage were it not for the current administrative difficulties of getting this done? What else can we do?