Case studyAll Things BLACK

Nobody returns to an empty room.

The All Things BLACK home page with the magenta Long Beach mural, the line The village has a URL, and links to the directory, map, calendar and knowledge library

Most community sites launch with a promise and an empty page. Visitors leave, and they do not return.

VERB Community wanted a front door for Black Long Beach, and they wanted it full on day one. So we set a rule. No category opens until it has listings worth trusting. We checked 38 resources, kept 24, and dropped the rest. A real person reads every listing before the public sees it.

Then we moved the whole site over and kept the old links working. When a surge of automated traffic knocked it offline, we found the cause and had it back the next day.