User blog:Noreplyz/Making Awesome Home Pages

I took a look at loads of home pages in the pursuit of making a blog post about the best ones. Because your wiki’s Main Page is a central place for your community to look around and do research, you should take in mind some of these tips I’ve collated from various top wikis around!

Have an awesome introduction!
Get your users excited about your wiki by making a clean, beautiful welcome. Get your wiki's visitors happy that they've landed in the correct place! In my home wiki, we’re in the process of designing a seasonal welcome message.

The Alternative History Wiki takes a more formal approach, by kindly welcoming visitors:

If you don’t have the time or design, skills, placing a logo and a welcome text can still suffice, like in the Russian Anime Characters Fight Wiki:

Have a good description (and SEO!)
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is key to getting your Wikia onto the interwebs! Adding keywords into a description on the main page will not only help you gain ranks on Google Search (or your other search engines), but also help others find out what your wiki is about. If your wiki is a bit iffy or covers a large amount of content, having a short sentence or two about the topic won’t hurt.

Keeping it short and sweet means that visitors can quickly decide whether they’re at the correct place or not, too!

Here’s a few: "The Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia is a free repository on all aspects of the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise that anyone can edit. We've been around since May 26, 2005 — and in that time we've assembled a lot of information about the cards and other aspects of the Yu-Gi-Oh! phenomenon. Please click here for dates of upcoming Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG & OCG product releases, as well as anime air dates and manga book release dates."

- Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki

"This site is a free-content encyclopedia of camera information, a repository of information about all still camera brands and models."

- Camerapedia

"The Disney Wiki is a free, public and collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to Walt Disney and the Disney corporation: theme parks, film companies, television networks, films, characters, and more. The wiki format allows anyone to create or edit any article, so we can all work together to create a comprehensive database for Disney fans."

- Disney Wiki

Awesome links!
People are here at your wiki to explore your wiki! So, give them many paths to get to new or featured content! If there’s a new event, such as a championship or new comic out, put that in a slider on the front page, or plug it in a featured content section. Alternatively, having Recent Blog Posts is another option, if your wiki is inclined to have administrators posting about new updates and releases.

For example, sliders like the one on Community Central help promote featured content:

For visitors who are coming back for more, placing links to common areas are effective for people looking for quest details or one of their favourite TV show episodes. Take a look at how clean and organised the Runescape Wiki have arranged their tiles:

And quickly, another beautifully executed way of letting users browse the Harry Potter fandom:

So what should I take out of this?
Make your wiki accessible for both new and recurring visitors by letting them not only understand your wiki, but traverse its contents. Have a clean and entertaining front page to entice your community to edit, contribute and learn!

P.S. I’m a whale, and it’s my first informative blog post on Community Central. What do you think? :)