This is a community for architectural visualization industry (Archviz)
After a year of use, I compiled a list of things I would like to see from PeerBoard - this is my opinion and some of my experiences. I extremely value the effort of the people who created this and this continues to provide value to many people every day.
Scroll to the bottom if you want to know what I think could improve.
Hi Everyone!
I've made my community integrated with WordPress. It's been difficult getting it all to work, but Peerboard support way extremely helpful and everyone took weeks of debugging and updating until the thing was finally working!
Check it out ---> https://eris.digital/
About
It's a community where architects and 3D artists meet - it's completely free for use and we have some of the best talent on board. I've been in the industry for years now and it's completely insane that nothing like this exists anywhere in the world. Every online community in this space in the past 5 years way inclined to monetize that connection between people in the industry and always acted as the man in the middle.
Our main focus:
- remain free for use
- provide additional value with other paid-for services - such as portfolio landing pages (see example here -> https://eris.digital/
- connect some of the best talent in Archviz industry with balance of around 50:50 of people offering 3D services and people in need for 3D services
THE NUMBERS
Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but in 5 days, our community went up by almost 400 people.
Conversions on our invites were above 13%, and average engagement time was above 40 seconds for the first time users. 3000 invites - 390 users and growing
What I would like to see from PeerBoard?
- make some kind of invite-management system - it's clunky and when UI is filled with expired invitations, you have to delete them BY HAND - very bad
- please give us the ability to control XML sitemap generation and integration with the rest of the website - it's extremely important and at this moment we don't have that ability
- image-optimization built-in -> do I need to say anything more about this? Currently it's a horror when people (who don't understand images) upload HUGE images and it slows down the whole community experience and wards-off potential engagement
- UI optimization + options -> for example, images in feed appear with dark rectangles if not in a perfect ratio -> give us the ability to have a picture shown in the feed for the pinned post ->
- make likes, comments, and user engagement more visually apppealing -> I have recently tried beam.gg community - and they are in a very low phase of development currently - they are simply bad right now and they need more time- but they got one thing right from the start - UI is very engaging. Sometimes I have a feeling that people don't even feel what they need to do at first when they enter the community - it's not clear
- ability to move (header) links around - option to highlight some of them
- highlight user posts - make it a reality please
- hide/show post information for specific group of users - simple as blurring out some information and that information is only visible by users in a select group of people.
- ability to show timestamps / datestamps on posts
- ability to paginate feed
- Why are images inserted so large? Why can't I make them smaller to fit my post?
- Instant message from admin to users
- email analytics on digests - open rates, clicks...
- user importing into Wordpress - can't get it to work.
- Community posts should appear in Wordpress as posts - at least give us the ability to share a post and to treat it as a wordpress post - this makes so much sense.
- Overall PeerBoard integration should be more integrated with wordpress so it feels like a part of the website, not a plugin -> many website builders did this flawlessly - I'm sure you can too
- Polls
- Additional feed content filtering - with predefined sets of tags, subcategories, or something similar
- Ability to move posts up or down in the feed
- Alternative archive option when posts are no longer relevant to the community - but may be relevant to someone from a google search - very high priority this one - when deselecting option "show in feed", posts should not appear in the feed - but I think they should appear when browsing categories. This way we have two functionalities acting the same - Archiving and not showing in the feed
That's all
I would love to hear what someone from the PeerBoard staff has to say about this.
Please comment on the bulletpoints.
Again, you guys are doing a great work and I really appreciate all that you do here. This is my opinion and constructive criticism after a year of use.
Eris, eris@digitalmarketing.gg