- Joined
- Jan 14, 2004
- Messages
- 741
The forum I run dates back to 1996 and it's had the same domain name and URL since 1997. (Yes, posts from the earliest days are still online), However, I've been giving serious thought to changing the name of my forum, and getting a new URL. Why?
1) To give this site a "more legitimate" .com domain.
2) With a few exceptions, Web sites tend to get less popular as they age. The site lost a lot of "buzz" between 2005 and 2010, in the face of news/blog sites, some popular new urbanism blogs, and now social media and Reddit. The subreddit for the topic is growing, while my forum struggles to attract new users. I'm beginning to think it's impossible to refresh a "legacy brand" on the Web -- consider Yahoo, MySpace, Live Journal, and even many of the classic big boards like Something Awful and The Straight Dope.
3) I don't think the "cyber" thing in the domain name (cyburbia dot org) is doing any favors. It was catchy in the late 1990s, but just sounds dated now. More so than the "e-whatever" theme.
No, the forum isn't dead or dying. It's a borderline big board with close to 800,000 mostly high-quality posts. There's a good core group of regulars. The switch to XenForo last year resulted in increased posting activity compared to vBulletin in the years just before. However, average post/day count leveled off a couple of months after the changeover. Google Analytics tells me that visitor traffic has been slowly increasing since the transition to vBulletin -- not bots, but real humans. Unfortunately, that's not translating into new users, which we really, really need to fill in the shoes of those who lose interest. The users would would have joined the site in 2005 or 2010 are on Reddit now.
I did an email blast last week to see if I could draw in the work-from-home crowd, but it didn't move the needle that day -- for about 4,000 users, there were maybe 20-30 more logins than on a normal weekday, and the posts/day count stayed about the same.
If I make the change, it'll be later this year. I want to make sure Google has all the new XenForo thread URLs properly indexed, and that there's nothing on Google that points to an old vBulletin URL. I don't want to have any content where there would be two redirects from what Google has -- no Cyburbia vBulletin to Cyburbia XenForo to [new name] XenForo.
Your thoughts?
1) To give this site a "more legitimate" .com domain.
2) With a few exceptions, Web sites tend to get less popular as they age. The site lost a lot of "buzz" between 2005 and 2010, in the face of news/blog sites, some popular new urbanism blogs, and now social media and Reddit. The subreddit for the topic is growing, while my forum struggles to attract new users. I'm beginning to think it's impossible to refresh a "legacy brand" on the Web -- consider Yahoo, MySpace, Live Journal, and even many of the classic big boards like Something Awful and The Straight Dope.
3) I don't think the "cyber" thing in the domain name (cyburbia dot org) is doing any favors. It was catchy in the late 1990s, but just sounds dated now. More so than the "e-whatever" theme.
No, the forum isn't dead or dying. It's a borderline big board with close to 800,000 mostly high-quality posts. There's a good core group of regulars. The switch to XenForo last year resulted in increased posting activity compared to vBulletin in the years just before. However, average post/day count leveled off a couple of months after the changeover. Google Analytics tells me that visitor traffic has been slowly increasing since the transition to vBulletin -- not bots, but real humans. Unfortunately, that's not translating into new users, which we really, really need to fill in the shoes of those who lose interest. The users would would have joined the site in 2005 or 2010 are on Reddit now.
I did an email blast last week to see if I could draw in the work-from-home crowd, but it didn't move the needle that day -- for about 4,000 users, there were maybe 20-30 more logins than on a normal weekday, and the posts/day count stayed about the same.
If I make the change, it'll be later this year. I want to make sure Google has all the new XenForo thread URLs properly indexed, and that there's nothing on Google that points to an old vBulletin URL. I don't want to have any content where there would be two redirects from what Google has -- no Cyburbia vBulletin to Cyburbia XenForo to [new name] XenForo.
Your thoughts?
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