Written by: 1/3/2012 11:03 AM
We are bombarded by an infinite amount of diet and exercise commercials in the media to get yourself in shape every year around this time. While that may be the number 1 New Year's Resolution among people, it could be beneficial to look at your own website and community too. I owned and operated my large gaming network, the Clan World Network. I was always coming up with new brilliant ideas and great things to add during the year to keep up with your competition or trends. Some of the ideas worked and some did not.
This time of the year is a great time to trim, merge, or adjust the unused or rarely used portions of your site. It is a great time to strengthening your focus on your strongest points of your community. Having a strong narrow focus could be a better strength than a bunch of weak little used content offerings.
Here are some other ideas to trim your site community. It does not have to be all about content either.
Member Database Purge – For large websites with names being held by dead accounts. Send out an email notifying them to verify the account to keep it active. If not, you can delete it and free it up for a new potential member or customer.
Forum Purge - Those little used forums you made that were a great idea at the time that are used more frequently by trolls then your own community members. It might be a good idea to archive, delete, or merge it with another.
Site Widgets – Many sites are offering content scripts to add to your website to share data back and forth between them. It might be a good idea to find a script to consolidate it with a third party script or remove it all together if it isn't producing the results you hoped.
Content or Category Merge/Purge - I am always against deleting any kind content on any site. Your content is valuable and is probably is search-able by the big search engines. It might be a good idea to close the category and archive the content for the search reason. Change your focus on the strong topics and content of your site for the year.
Staff Reduction - This had to be the one of the hardest reductions to go through for any type of organization. Sometimes this is a necessary evil to be fair and true to your community and staff. Trim the in-actives or least participating help and recruit stronger passionate ones. This could get your year off on the right direction by invigorating your community with new blood.
There are many more examples of how you can trim your website community and strengthen it for the new year. Not every site needs to trim down. Some communities may need to get bigger. Keep working on building the best community site you can and the hard work will payoff. These changes were just suggestions. Please put some thought into any action you make before you do it. Consult with your community and website team before you make any of these changes.
What other areas of a community website can be trimmed down?
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