Welcome pages are the first impression you make to a new community member. I don’t know about you, but I was stupidly viewing this page as a throwaway. “We’re so glad you joined the Sueetie.com Community! blah-blah-blah.”
When I join a new community I want to know I’m being welcomed personally with something of value from MY perspective as a user and new member. So in Gummy Bear 1.2, the Welcome Page—the page that displays after a user creates a site account—will consist of a Content Part for site administrators to provide their own welcoming message of value.
Here’s what the Sueetie.com Welcome page now looks like. (You can see it live here.) I put my head inside a new member and considered why they took the time to register. It was most likely to download Gummy Bear, and that’s cool. So that was the new focus of the Welcome page.
So I'm happy with the new welcome page, but astute readers will know I had the cart ahead of the horse on this one. The Welcome page displays only to users when the site is configured for Automatic Registration. I just implemented Email Verification, so the redirect page on login would be the site home page. No harm, no foul. With the recent site re-theming I added a big fat call-to-action "Download Gummy Bear" button to serve the same purpose.
So the moral to this story is that the welcome page is important and in Gummy Bear 1.2 site administrators are going to have the opportunity or onus to make it real.