What can we do to improve our community?

[Matt R]

Hello All,

I am looking for some insight on what you think we can to do improve our community. I believe strongly in our forum for a number of reasons and I would like to expand and involve a lot more of our client base. Right now it only represents a few percent of our client base (which in a way is good, we figure more people would come here if they had problems or were unhappy).

Why I like communities/forums

1) I like the personal feel it adds. It's good to be able to interact with you, our customers on many levels both service related and not. You can give us feedback on our services, you can make suggestions. You can speak to the decision makers and the key people in our team and make yourself heard. That's important to us, as is the 'getting to know' you type feel from just interacting. The internet can be a faceless way of doing business. We do not necessarily want it to be that way.

2) Communities are powerful. Communities work on projects together and make things happen. Now, I'm not looking for us to change the world or anything like that but strong community action can help us improve all of our businesses.

3) Culture. We have clients from many different countries in the world and I personally find it fascinating to learn about new cultures and lifestyles. The community here can open the door to this.

4) Doing business together. We all have a website for many different reasons. A large majority of our client base has a business orientated website. If we can encourage trade and business deals between our clients (website/graphic design, SEO, consultancy, copywriting, etc) we'd be very pleased.

These are just a few thoughts off the top of my head. I would be very interested to hear what you think we could do to improve and build on this forum. We're very open to suggestions and we're happy to change the format/structure of the forums for the better.
One suggestion may be website reviews/critique -- I'd be happy to get our own designers to give feedback from time to time if people would find it interesting.

So please... let the discussion role and lets build a large community that will benefit us all?

[Tony]

I'm not sure there's much more you can do. In any community, only 10% of people will participate anyway.

I know adding instant email notification for new threads has been ignored far too long. It's a simple no-edit mod and would allow us to subscribe to forums, not just threads.

[Saf M]

Tony can you post the link to installation file here so that I can ask someone to take care of this?

[calvynlee]

I suggest WHB can create a Social Bookmarking Website.

Invest some SEO into the website, it will benefit your popularity also benefit other webmaster

[Matt R]

We are PR7 and have a fast growing Facebook community

We also spend 10s of thousands of dollars every year on SEO just on the WHB website.

[Alan B]

How about finally adding new fields to the forums profile to display the forum member's hosting type and the name of his/her client's server. This had lots of support, including from Matt:
http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/forum/...s-profile.html

[omniuni]

Hmm..... WHB "tags" that we can post on our website, a simple little gd/php image that always shows our server name and configuration.... honestly.... dress up the forums a bit. The theme has been pretty much default for too long.... maybe offer some sort of little bonus to people when they make 200 posts or something, like a free domain name. Have a WHB site directory, it would be cool to browse other peoples websites that WHB hosts.... think "WHB Stumble".