: How to turn visitors into site members (running a Q&A site)? My Site is getting around 250 unique visitors from search daily. What UI changes (or other changes) should I make to make it more

@Moriarity557

Your site is very much a Stack Exchange type of site so I will point out some of their good points that your site is lacking:


Very low barrier to sign-up: in your site you have to register to participate, in SE sites you can provide a name and email address to provide an answer. Once this is done you are basically created as a user and can answer questions as needed. Also you should look at SE sites OpenID selector, rather than having people to create yet another login password. Have a look at this and this
Your site is not focused on one particular topic. Especially for a web based business it is important to focus on one particular area. You can solve this problem by providing segmentation. Allow some way for your users to filter content based on categories. In this way people will easily be able to see information that is relevant to themselves. Otherwise you fall into the trap of being too far reaching and nobody to answer the questions.
Why have a separate register link up the top? I would remove it as it is a one time action. Most people understand these days that registration for new users is under login anyway and you can display an extra login/registration link where necessary throughout the site.
Also with the segmentation mentioned above I would spend your spare time tagging all of your old questions that are untagged
I would spend some time adding some polish to your design. I know this is not done on Stack Overflow, but you are not reaching out to programmers who just want quality answers, yours is an entertainment platform Bicycles has a great design, I would really make the effort to make your site look nicer. I would also lose the bold on the question titles on the home page, your page is wayyyy to dark. It is hard to scan with your eyes.
Gamify! Your users need a reason to return and motivation to keep participating. You would be surprised how much angst people have over losing 2 points of rep on SE sites.
Social. Make some way for people to be able to post questions easily to Twitter or Facebook.


Lastly, you need to create 20 dummy accounts and start astro-turfing your site. Don't leave your poor users hanging more than 24 hours to get a single answer. I see plenty of 0 answer questions. You're going to need to pick those up yourself. There's no point in offering a free advice platform if people are not getting any free advice. You're going to have to DIY for a while until you have enough users.

There you go; a long way left to go, but if you are getting 200+ visits a day that is a nice start and a good opportunity to build further. Good luck!

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@Murray155

If they register they could then follow discussions they are interested in. (So when someone posts an update, they get an email about it.)

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