By Dino Dogan
We must be in a 10th iteration of Triberr’s homepage. Wanna go back in time?
March 2011
Here’s Triberr’s homepage on March 13th, 2011 when we first launched.
That’s a quick and silly video I made to introduce Triberr. Soooo amateur.
We showcased few members as well, and we attempted to explain what Triberr is with the value proposition statements. I’m pleased to say they still hold up, except you’re more likely to quadruple your traffic.
June 2011
The next major update came in June of 2011 when we decided to be little bit playful and create the Incredible Triberr-man, drawn by John Garrett of Hypertransitory.
As you can see, we featured some of our more prominent members in the section we called the “the social proof belt”, and we tried to surface some of the more prominent tribes based on size, reach, and quality.
August 2011
The next major update, and one of my favorite iterations, came in August of 2011, in what I call Triberr’s “red” period. Dig the bold color choice in the top navigation bar.
While the homepage may look like a radical departure from the previous versions, it’s really more of the same. We were simply trying to connect readers with bloggers.
So, anyone could come to Triberr homepage and click on latest posts, or search for posts within a specific category. I was a big fan of this version. It served as my daily reader’s digest.
We also showcased our transparency, which is an ideal we always strive for. We kept a constant count of the number of unique visits we sent to our members in the last 24 hrs.
In the above image, you can see that even back then, essentially 6 months into Triberr’s existence, we were sending over 100,000 daily visits to our member blogs. This is how we’ve always measured our success. Not by the number of visits we get to Triberr.com. That doesn’t matter.
What matters the most, is the number of visits we send to our members. That’s our DNA.
February 2012
2012 marks Triberr’s return to blue and an attempt at sophistication (not sure what we were smoking to use red 🙂 )
We took the cue from Facebook and tried to make the sign-up front and center.
We found that a lot of people didn’t understand what a “tribe” is, so we figured let’s explain it. That’s no joke. I literarily had people asking me “sooo…ummm…whud do ya mean by “tribe”?
Some dude told me the word “tribe” is offensive to Jewish people. Another lady said she’d use Triberr but I couldn’t seriously expect her to invite her business associates to something called a “tribe”.
The whole issue left me befuddled. To me, the word “tribe” always meant a basic social unit consisting of humans devoted to helping each other. Our family is our first tribe. But our coworkers, friends, teammates…all of them represent a tribe of people…anyways. I feel like I’m preaching to the choir
Also, notice one of my favorite tag lines we used with Triberr. “One giant leap for bloggers”.
The blog was immediately underneath the main area, and on the right, you’ll notice that we were still in invite mode.
September 2012
This time, we took the cue from Lady Gaga. That’s no joke.
Lady Gaga had a very ballsy homepage simply stating “Welcome home, monsters”. So we decided to declare Triberr a home for all bloggers. We always felt it was anyways, and we were feeling pretty confident. So, a simple call to action + several value propositions with faces of people we felt embody those values.
Also, on September 22nd -the day of equinox- we held the first official Tribe Up in NYC. See videos here.
April 2013
We must have been very happy with the Lady Gaga homepage. We kept it for 7 months. And then we decided to embrace our own inner comic-book fan and feature the Incredible Triberr-man front and center.
We gave people the ability to browse tribes and follow them. During the follow initiation, you can request to be promoted to a full fledged member. The Chief receives an email, checks out your digital footprint and decides if s/he wants to invite you into the tribe. Art imitates life sometimes. 🙂
We got bunch of nice write-ups on Forbes, Technorati, and Yahoo, so we threw those in there as a way to instill trust and authority to first-time visitors.
AND NOW…
We reveal the latest iteration of Triberr homepage.
It may look very familiar to Triberr users, and that’s because we decided to expose most of the guts to first time visitors even if they’re not logged in.
The idea here is to go back to our roots and enable anyone, even people without a Triberr account, to read, share, and engage with bloggers and their content.
It also serves as a first lesson in “how to Triberr” since most of its guts are exposed to non-logged in users.
We decided to showcase Triberr as a great place to discover amazing content. We all know that to be true, but non-members are still little puzzled as to what Triberr is all about. So, this should help.
We borrowed a little from Digg with the whole New/Hot/Rising sections, and we added a pinch of Imgur with the ability to consume content without creating an account.
Bottom line is, we think once people see how amazing Triberr is, they will be clamoring for an account. 🙂
The benefit our members get is that the best posts get more exposure.
