I personally think IIP is the greatest thing going since sliced bread. I personally chant "JustDave" each evening when visiting my site and thank my stars for all the awesome mods of his I use there.
I think IIP can be used as a home page to a site... but I agree.. it can be confusing out of the box.
If people find your site's home page (IIP) and don't know what it is about or how it works... IIP won't help them.
But, with minimal modification to IIP you can "work with it" and add the needed information to it.
The first thing I did Is create a forum to put stuff that I want on the home page, and set it up as the first "news" forum for it to pull from. I turned the HTML on, and turned off pictures and dates etc... for it.
The first post I've got "stuck" there.. is a post explaining what the site is about.... and in our case... while it's not porn... we do have adult topic discussions, so my warning goes there.
Below it we rotate in a banner.... it's simply a post with a HTML banner in it, and the other Admin changes those from time to time by hand.
Below that, I've got a rather large sticky post where I paste comments and testimonials I receive from our users. How they feel better, how our site has changed their lives... that type of thing.
So that the new visitor can get a vibe for what our site is, simply by reading down the cneter column of the home page.
Below that, we've got another ad.... then I pull in the begining of my latest "how to" post for the site... then below that, we recap the 5 most recent posts in our main forum. These change by the minute and thus the front page keeps changing.
Custom Pals I've also created a few "generic" pal boxes.. where I have placed throughout the page some Amazon.com Product Links. These generate a little revenue and add some interesting graphics to the front page.
The Menu I've modified the menu a bit, to offer a direct link to our photo galleries (a pay service) and another link 'Browse our Forums' which take them to the ubbthreads.php index page. Just another way "in" if they are confused about what to click or where to go.
In another site that I set up... one that is not nearly as active and does not use IIP for it's home page, I tweaked IIP a bit as well.
You'll note in the first post I've got "stuck" to the top right (I use only 2 columns here)... I've made links to certain forums... and important posts. These were just simple links, made in a post using UBB code... very simple and no "deep" modifications to the PHP.
These suggestions may not work for anybody but me... but in my opinion, they are little things which help if you were trying to use IIP as a "home page".
On the measurection site, since the begining, it was just a splash page... with a warning and an Enter / Exit button before you got to threads. So new users find it much more "interesting" as it's always changing... making us look "happening" and active.
We even have a member who is totally blind. He relies totally on screen reading software. He has to tab line by line, box by box, and graphic by graphic and listen to what it is. Yet he has only been there a few months and has like 300 posts... so he's pretty active. He relies heavily on the "Current" and "Most Recent" pals... as otherwise he can't tell what's new until he get's email subscriptions for each forum which his software can read to him. But he knows to get to the home page... and look at (or listen to) the current and most recent threads, and he can actively participate in the discussions, without having to wait for the subscriptions to go out. BTW - Just an aside.. this man has far less technical issues and questions than a majority of our full-sighted members.
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