Most companies using open-source community software end up with a community site which doesn’t look great.
Either they display a long list of discussions like BoingBoing or do some development work like Marvel.
Both are ok, but they miss out on the opportunity to spend a little more money developing something that looks as good as most enterprise platforms out there today.
Most enterprise communities (e.g. Dropbox and Square below) focus on ensuring the community is clean, easy to participate, and easy to navigate.
They do this by having a landing page. You don’t drop people into a mass of discussions, you drop them into a page that makes it easy to find what they want and help them get started.
It’s pretty easy to build a front-page for an open-source platform. We’ve been exploring it for the redesign of our community (below)
(we’ve also added a button to hide it for regular members)
If you’re going to use an enterprise community platform, it shouldn’t be for how it looks (that’s down to the implementation partner), it should be for integrations, security, and reliability.
If those aren’t as critical to you, then use an open-source platform (Vanilla/Discourse etc) but please spend just a little extra to develop a proper landing page for the community.
p.s. Come and join us at experts.feverbee.com.