Tutorial: How to create a homepage for your community in under 5 minutes

The homepage is the page that is shown when your domain name is entered. E.g. https://www.example.com/. After the fresh installation of Invision Community, your homepage will show the list of your forums.

This forum overview page is in most cases not the best solution for the homepage.

The beauty of this video tutorial is that you do not need to write any code, but just use widgets placed by drag-drop on the page. You can rearrange, delete and replace blocks with a mouse click. This is the power of Page Builder you get with Invision Community.

Why do you need a homepage for the community?

The homepage is the best way to present an overview of your community, explain your goals, and get the user to register. The is  homepage also intended to attract traffic from search engines.

A homepage exists as a single page. It has lots of information and focuses on introducing your community. Your homepage is an invitation to the visitor to explore your offer and to convince the user to participate.

Your homepage is the face of your community. So, you should include here information targeted at new visitors. This is normally the general background of your community, as well as recent news, topics, members' achievement, parts where the user can participate.

The homepage should introduce the visitor to your community. It is an exploration point for the rest of your community. Think of it as rolling out the red carpet for potential community members. The three core elements of information should be found on the homepage.

What information a community homepage should include?

1. Community Introduction: You have a whole page worth of space, so your community introduction can be more detailed. To avoid long text pieces, homepages are generally broken up into several sections. Different sections can include

• the main message for your community
• who are your targeted members
• story of the community

On your landing pages, you may also integrate multimedia. See this tutorial for special Page Builder widgets.

2. Trust Indicators: Trust indicators can be the total number of registered members, topics, posts, downloads, reviews, images, news, or everything else that is the central part of your community. You can also show the users currently online or being online in the last few hours.

You can add recent mentions of your community on other trust sites. Social media followers are a great trust indicator. Furthermore, you can showcase prominent community members like yourself or other known experts in your niche.

3. Best Content: Show your best content by promoting the best content of your users. Present the newest topics, threads, or posts to show you're alive and up-to-date. Feature hot content that has a lot of replies or reactions.

Typically, a homepage is full of links. You want the visitor to fully investigate your community, so they should be able to go to different areas or navigate through with little effort.

4. Call-To-Action: Add default blocks for guests to register or subscribe to a newsletter, if you have one. 

Important search engine optimization for the homepage

• Page Title - is what is displayed on the browser tab and as linked title in the search result
• Meta Tags - while meta keywords do not play any role, you should pay attention to meta description. This part can and will be used in a Google search snippet.
• Do some keyword research for texts you add with WYSIWYG widgets
• Use HTML headings like h1 by editing HTML source. Alternatively, you can also install the CKEditor format plugin if you are more comfortable to format headings per mouse click.
• Check that your homepage has an appealing share image that will be used if someone shares your community on social media.
• The homepage is not necessarily a starting page! So do not forget to include a link to the homepage into your main menu.
• Use Google Search Console to submit your homepage for faster index
• Use Google Analytics or Matomo to investigate bounce rate and adjust widgets and texts if it does not perform well.

A well-structured and appealing homepage can help you to build a strong web community. Doing on-page search engine optimization helps to attract new visitors.

Do not miss the chance to build a community homepage to get more from your content.