Guild wesites and forums

Foot traffic on the guild forums seems to be another of the problems that Gm's face. Our forum has average use but it seems to be the same people using it and generally those people arent the ones who NEED to read the boss guides, loot rules or relevant gaming information we have provided.



Not long after I set up the website I ran a competition for all guildies. All you had to do was post something on the forums ( and "Bump" didnt count)
all the names were put into a hat - yea i really did put them into a hat- and the name that was drawn was awarded a rather nice upgrade to the value of around 2500 gold's worth (It was a Leatherwear piece so I crafted it myself). This at least resulted in some guildies finding their way to the website but didnt result in repeat or regular revisits.

Since then I have run some polls, posted guild updates and the like with guild messages of the day(GMOTD) reminding people of the forum www link. So again its the same half dozen or so people who race off and check when a new MOTD appears. But some just seem resistant to looking.

This was highlighted to me last night following a raid when i was berating the guildies on vent about Raidleader ettiquette. Reminding them that its a tough enough job for a new raidleader to find their feet but it is made harder still when there are 3-9 other people in the 10 man also trying to raidlead. I might point out that none of these budding raidleaders had applied to actually be raidleaders when I recently advertised on the forums. It was at this time I also pointed out that if these people wanted to be raidleaders then they could still apply to lead their own raids and not take over other peoples - and perhaps reading the forums once in a while might have helped ( re the not knowing about raidleader roles) ... I was a bit snarky at this point but i think i put it a little less offensively.. hmm maybe it was more *shrugs*.

So I started thinking about some new iniatives to get foot traffic on the forum

I have been toying with the idea about having the raid calendar on the forums anyway and having looked around at what other guilds are doing it seems to be a common occurance. One benefit of having the raid calendar on the forums is that it will make it easier for the raid leaders to assign roles prior to the event. It will encourage people to use the forums and it will enable the raidleaders to link the boss guides into the event if need be. It will also provide a better history of who is attending which runs..

I also decided that I would run a weekly Contributors competition on the forums again. This will coincide with the raid calendar starting on the forums so that it makes that transition smoother. The competition will be run over three weeks and the BEST forum post for the week will win the contributor a primordial saronite.

So my son pipes up from the background what makes it the best? and could he write a pvp guide? I said thats EXACTLY the kind of content that would be in the best category.

Raid calendar uh- huh what else?

So in the interests of true delegation, I have a forum editor who posts something most days to ensure that there is always something new on the site to encouorage people to come back (thanks honey, tho you missed today :P) But i have decided to add a couple of new things:

1. Word games : use the following words in a sentence 
2. Where or what in the World is that? I will post a picture of random places and things in WoW  - the first person to guess its origin correctly will win a prize. 

 I have heard some suggest that Guild websites are really only useful for recruitment but its a great place to pass information to the masses and to make sure that there is no excuse for people not knowing whats going on ingame or inguild. The only excuse is that they cant be arsed actually opening a web browser.

So if anyone else has any ideas - let me know :)