Looking for suggestions... (band fan site)

I'm working on a new site for my wife, a fan site for the Goo Goo Dolls.

http://ggdfans.com/

Besides a custom style (which I know will be the first response from a lot you guys ) would kind of recommendations would you have for me to get people posting or at least sticking around the site longer than a quick peek? Thanks to occasional Twitter links (maybe 1 out 10 tweets is a link back to the site) I know people are checking it out and the search bots are slowly starting to find us but I'm not getting that translated into new registrations.

If nothing else I've noticed that the main existing competing site has started to put a new effort into their forums since we've launched.


(PS: A custom style is not in the budget right now because I'm currently having a custom style done for one of my vB sites to be converted over to XF. Wallet is a bit empty so one major project at a time.)

The background is a bit matt perhaps get a metallic type image that echoes but not copies the official site. Azhria Lilu's idea of of a photo gallery is very good, perhaps get a picture on the home page and randomize it, change it every page refresh.

I know it's a forum rather than a website but I'd still expect to see images of the artist(s) as soon as I hit the site. I also think a front page (portal) containing the latest news with images is a must have. If it's constantly updated it should encourage potential members to return for more news and perhaps start to contribute.

At the moment it doesn't really inspire a return visit. The first thing that poked me in the eye on what is effectively the landing page was 'Hi, I'm Kevin...' and 'Robby is a father!'. While that might indicate a good community spirit is says nothing at all about the band. On a fan site I'd expect to be hit in the face with images, videos and current news of the band rather than social chit chat.

First of all, I don't see a forum on googoodolls.com--you might see about making it the official GGD forum once things are up and running. If they allow advertising on their site at all, I say go for it. Could also post blog comments with relevant links to the site.

As for your site, I would include something relevant to their logo/brand in your logo, as long as it's not copyrighted or anything. Pictures of the band are a good idea; I might also suggest installing XenMedio or something custom to upload the band's discography for listening pleasure. You could also use that for people to post live footage after they attend a GGD concert.

More original content might be a good idea as well, such as song analysis, discussion of live performances, favorite covers, best band quotes, influences...etc. Of course, if you're not as big a fan as your wife is, that might be a problem. Is there anything she specifically wants to see from a GGD forum (i.e. something that made her want her own forum instead of the already-established competitor's site)?

Thanks for the feedback so far everybody!

Long story short... they have an official fan area, including forums, that are behind a paywall. I've had some limited success reaching a couple of the band members via Twitter but responses from them are hit-or-miss. So far the Twitter account is doing much better than the forum.

Suggestions? I'm checking out [XFR] User Albums but I'm not seeing it being able to handle adding YouTube or other embedded video. The other 'media' add-on out there is from a developer that I'm not really fond of (seems to be motivated by the intention of getting donations but doesn't care at all about trying to help people actually using his mods or taking their suggestions into account).

You pointed out what I was trying to avoid, of doing an image that too closely looked like the background of the official site. Suggestions for color scheme? I'm trying to avoid the typical "Oh, it is music related so it must be a dark 'grunge' theme." thought process. (Plus the wife has expressed she likes a lighter scheme.) Good idea on the random image. I just wish my Photoshop skills were better. I may have to start seeing what I can do anyway.

I'm been trying to avoid the XF portal that is most common right now but that is a direction I may have to go in. It would make my day if Kier/Mike announced that that were planning some type of simple portal add-on for XF.

So portal & gallery on the short list?

The forum on the official site is buried behind their paywall. I don't think it is linked to anywhere except for when after you are signed into the member area.

I like the idea suggested above of a random image in the header. Thanks to the Mrs. we actually have dozens of concert pics that we can use.

I'm resisting XenMedio (see response above to Azh').

I would likely be considered a fan but not an addict like the wife & others.

Wait until you get married and you realize that after a few years it is much easier to stop asking 'Why?' to some things.

By coincidence I'm also trying to avoid (probably) the same portal but need one for a forum I'm currently developing. I'd be dancing in the streets if an in-house option became available. But yeah, I really think you need an image heavy front page that pulls content from the forum. A portal and gallery would obviously help deliver that.

Avoiding Jaxels add-ons is probably the smartest decision anyone can do. He is the only developer I've had to provide additional support for regarding his styles (To fix bugs).

As for the style, something that 311 does (I'm re-doing their forums for when they convert to XenForo) is to base the design of their site/forum off of the latest album cover.

Hehe; very true

Good point; several other artists (Michelle Branch and Maroon 5 come to mind) do this too.

Perhaps sub forums for individual albums and their associated tours and concerts. Some people, like me, get stuck in a time warp and aren't interested in a group after it eveolves past a certain point but would hapy partake in / reminisce about the golden days as they see them. Don't forget the bootleg era when the band was a struggling up and coming band that will also interest some people.

I'm not ready to pully the trigger yet on XenPorta but what I'm thinking for the short term is perhaps something like Calorie's attachments on the forum home mod slightly tweaked.

On a side note, what is your though process on your own site for a portal? Thinking of going with a CMS (WP, Subdreamer, etc.), XenPorta, or something else?

I try to avoid calling anybody out specifically but I'll just say that the attitude of some add-on makers is just awful (as I type that I hope nobody is saying the same about the mods I've released over the years! ).

If I was graphics oriented that is something that I would try to do.

You don't think a forum per album might be too much too soon? I've been trying to avoid the problem a lot of new forums do of creating a bunch of forums before there is a lot of activity in them.

I don't know the group at all or how many albums they had I was just throwing out a general idea. Perhaps initially just split into "Albums" and "Singles" and go from there as the postcount rises.

Yup; I say start with a general Albums forum and one for Singles, then reorganize later if you have to. You can always use thread prefixes too (i.e. [Let Love In] "Give A Little Bit").

Let me know if you figure out about tweaking Calorie's attachments mod, since that would be interesting to use on my site as well if I could figure out the best way to make it work (can't attach MP3s, since people would then illegally download them; single/album covers, maybe).

There's probably a lot of promo videos on Youtube and similar sites that could be legally used.

That remains a bit of a problem and one I've yet to find real a solution for. The forums I want to migrate to XenForo are currently running on vBulletin and SMF. All but one of them are quite large and in one case, the official forum for a corporate entity. I have to have long term stability and the product needs to be quite versatile as I pull in and display a lot of data from all over the place e.g. my gaming forum shows the status of all the games and comms servers we run. I also pull a lot of feeds from ranking sites etc.

vBadvanced CMPS & Dynamics do exactly what I want as does the portal management extension I use for SMF. Unfortunately I've yet to find anything that meets all the requirements as far as XenForo goes. I use WordPress a lot but it doesn't have the integration I need. XenPorta would have been at the top of my list but I find it really pedantic, it took me half a day just to install it and work out how to get a couple of modules to display data. Having to trawl though a bazillion posts to find out why something is not working as intended is just not sustainable for me and on top of that, there's no support package on offer.

At the moment I'm evaluating Subdreamer. It ticks all the boxes with the possible exception that it might place limitations on the how I want my sites to display visually. I'm not yet convinced that I can make it bend to my will in that department but it's too early to be sure.

The search goes on

I like the idea of using thread prefixes for some things like album names. I have a forum named "Concerts & Appearances" for example and I could use prefixes there for stuff like "Concert" versus "TV" versus "Interview" and the such.

I started playing around with it last night so that clicking on the thumbnail links to the post instead of launching the lightbox. Got it working but the URL is not fully qualified so I need to play around a bit more to get it to match the URLs that the rest of the site is using (it works but just not rewritten and little things drive me nuts until they work the way I want them to). I also need to change it to check for permissions because reading that thread it looks like it is pulling in attachments from private nodes as well. That wouldn't be a good thing.

I've got it nearly ready. The only thing bothering me is that I'm not seeing how the current code takes permissions into account; it requests them but I don't see anything being excluded due to them.