Continuing our usability series using YAP as a case study (posts 1 and 2 are here and here) , here's a little thing that is super important for the home page: the Last Members Online widget.
The most important piece of any online community is the people in it. Show them off!
I actually quite like seeing some "picture-less" icons in the snapshot, because it tells me instantaneously that there are new people coming in all the time - of course we're lucky in that the majority of YAPstars have pictures up. But I do think that it also encourages those newbies to put up a photo pretty quickly, as their non-photo'd selves stand out. It's a nice way to surreptitiously get people to take action in the site, to look at their profile, to identify themselves to others from the get-go.
Important note: When you are launching a new site, it's especially important that this widget show off the most recent members to visit the site and not just "members" - and ESPECIALLY not members alphabetically if you've pre-populated the profiles from your database (which I think is a horribly bad idea for many reasons which I can go into in a different post or in the comments should you be interested). What happens when you do that, is that you may show your site as having x thousand members, but someone new will go into it and be faced with a wall of blank profiles - a ghost town. Yuck. Whereas, if you show the latest people to visit, you're quite likely to have several of your early adopters / champions / beta testers showing up there, who (by their early-adopter nature) are more likely to have photos up and profiles filled out.
The "Last Members Online" widget makes your community more friendly and welcoming from the very first moment someone arrives.
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