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Old January 6th, 2004, 05:34 PM   #5
ricktu
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Moovok ... by all means go ahead and create the portal style site but guys don't forget that while this will make the site more attractive it will not bring in new members. At Beyond Babylon poor ole Robin sweated blood to make a high tech portal site for the place and it had no real effect on the userbase. In fact it is all but dead. As Chris has pointed out people come to a site for content and sense of community. Not for any fancy looking interfaces. A point I argued ad nauseum at 3d frontier which was ignored and now that place, once one of massive potential, is now a graveyard.

As most of you guys know I've been around this scene from very near the begining and by now I've got a pretty good idea why some places flourish and others fade away. And while the reasons may be relatively obvious it does not mean that making a successful site is easy. Especially as it is normally a several staged process.

To begin with a site normally starts with a group of individuals putting together a forum and then adding some content of some kind. Usually galleries to start with then meshes and tutorials. Now this is important because new people have to firstly have a reason to come to the site and secondly a reason to stay. Content will generally get people to come but finding reasons to stay is more complicated. Generally it's because the existing inhabitants look like they are of both similair interests and also seem like the type of people you'd like to hang out with.

Now as I'm not flush with time I'm generalising a lot here. (hense the rambling nature of this post, no time to frame it properly) As you will realise there are lots of wrinkles to the above statements. A lot of people that stay at these boards are bored, lonely kids who only want a place that will let them in. They generally have only a vague interest in 3d and are more interested in childish "insanity" type threads because those are the ones they can contribute too. The serious ones would require that they make an effort to learn in order to be of value.

Another wrinkle is that different types of content attracts different types of people. From experience mesh downloads are worthless for long term success. People flock in , such the content dry then vanish. Lets face it 95% of those meshes downloaded are never used beyond one quick load and one press of the render button. The serious people, the ones ideally the site wants to stay either only uses their own meshes or will only download occasionally the meshes that they need for their current piece of work. Galleries are good once you have built up a userbase of talented artists but unless they are of outstanding quality (ie Drakath) then it will not have a great impact. News has also been mentioned and should only be considered as a service to existing members. There are so many good news sites that no one is going to be impressed with a site just because it offers that.

That leaves tutorials and to my mind the most effective type of content. It attracts mostly those people that are relatively serious about learning or improving their 3d skills and are likely to be the type of people that would help make the forums interesting. However tutorials alone will not keep people hanging around and participating.

So in other words people will initially come to a site depending on it's content. And the type of people who come will depend on both the type and the quality of that content.

For this new site to become a community will depend on the people that stay on and participate in the forums. And those early stages define how the site will end up. If the inital stages contain too many kiddies with their cracked copies of max etc going on about slapping each other with trout then the older more serious surfers will move on without saying a word. (I've either moved on or even pulled away from some sites for this reason) After all people generally want to mix with people like them and while I like a bit of knockeround fun as much as the next 38 year old I've no interest in playing kids games. Now on the other hand if the mix is a bit better and there is a range of ages and topics etc then that might entice people to stay on.

And so it goes on from there. I daren't re-read this post or I wont submit it. To say what I'm thinking would require ten times the space and the time. Sufice to say that I agree totally with Chris and that if you are serious about ressurecting this site then you are going about it without thinking it right through. You should learn the lesson that there are already far too many site graveyards out there that had a mountain of effort put into them but not enough planning.

More on that later if it becomes deemed neccessary...

Richard.
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