One thing that could change, in my humble opinion, is the CigarPass homepage.
I'm a newb. Have been and will be for a long time when it comes to cigars. But I'm not a newb on the internet. One thing I'm sure of is that a landing page can make or break someone's experience with a website. Make it confusing or unclear and they'll either play it by their own rules or they'll take the first exit.
A couple suggestions I have to accommodate the newbs, based on my own experience when I joined this site:
- Ditch most of the links on the cigarpass.com homepage.
- Set up an extremely simple homepage with a very large search box, a la Google, that searches the CigarPass forum archives.
- Hide/suppress, delete the default search function that rests on the top menu of the site. The results from this search function (vs. the internal Google search engine) are terrible, clunky, and do nothing to stave off newbie questions that FOGs have answered over and over again.
We really should think of the newbie experience from the newbie perspective. They may be coming to cigarpass by simply clicking on a link that says
http://www.cigarpass.com/ -- 99% of the stuff that's present on that page is difficult for a newb to understand. They don't know anything about passes, lingo, jargon, nothing about the notion of what makes CP different. While I do think the CP homepage does a lot to give the impression that this place is a few degrees different from the other cigar hubs on the web, the homepage doesn't answer a lot of the things that are going on through their heads, e.g.,
- I just got a handful of Cuban cigars from my brother-in-law -- how do I keep them fresh?
- Is Thompson/CI/Famous/JR a safe place to buy cigars?
- What does ISOM mean?
How many FOGs access CP from the homepage? I'd wager very few. The homepage is the front door to the site. It should be tailored to people who have never been here. FOGs know how to get here via the back door. Don't put things on the homepage that mean everything to FOGs but nothing to newbs. The one thing that people understand how to use on the web is a search box. But if you hide it (e.g., the bottom of the page), or make the results difficult to parse, chaos ensues.
In my own crazy view, the primary thing new people should see when they load up the CP home page is a search box with a little bit of text on top of it that says something like, "Got questions about cigars? Get your answers from the CigarPass community:"
If I wasn't working my way through a bottle of Elijah Craig (which I never knew about until lurking on the CP forums), I'd throw together a mockup of what I'm talking about...
Anyway, sorry for the rant. User experience and content on the web is something I get heated up about, for better or for worse... Let the newb slapping commence!