Website Advice: Registration Page Landing Page or Home page?

[Emil @ CliqueOut]

I need your advice:

I have a social network website, and i'm not sure if i should let users go directly to the homepage or go to a landing page where they would need to register/log in before they can access the platform.

If they go directly to homepage, they can view the personals posts, etc but won't be able to view some pages (restricted access). They would need to register/log in to ad profiles, etc.

If they go to landing page to register/login before they can go view everything.


The landing page would be like psd page, while the home page is a homepage wordpress.

My main concern is SEO - it works better with homepage, not landing page.
But i don't want people to go in, see and leave if they are directly straight to homepage.

The network is new, so we don't have alot of users yet. My developer said i should direct all users to homepage for them to see and once i have some traffic, then i could hide it and apply the landing page.

What do you guys think?
Website cliqueout.com

Thanks

[Robert J]

If you force people to register before they can even see what the site is about, they are likely to leave rather than bother to register.

Let them browse & get interested, but redirect to the register/login page if they try to do anything but look at public stuff.

(I would not use Wordpress or similar for any site you hope to get a lot of traffic - it's a monstrous package and a server-killer when it gets a lot of users.. Start writing your own html/php code, it's many times more efficient & the whole site will 'feel' more responsive to users).

[Jake]

You need to give away a lot to initially engage prospects, some selling educational material actually include their best information in the free teaser content, having calculated that is the way to maximize sales for their particular case.

Just having rational technical reasons for requiring registration for some privileges like posting, including robot spam prevention may be sufficient justification for it, without being excessively exclusionary.