you do an awesome job of welcoming people idealist. :D

Why, thank you Curious! (Idealist blushes deeply with embarrassment...but eats it up anyway!) Coming from a Texas girl like you, that really means a lot...:D

I do so agree on welcoming people being a very special way to make a newbie feel part of this community. It immediately makes a stranger not feel strange anymore and helps people to quickly feel comfortable to post about themselves and their needs. It is so good that we have many members here who make a special point of being welcomers:p



Another way I really feel we can grow our community is if each of us individual members work toward building our database in all of the various forums that we participate in, or have an interest/knowledge in.
The more our database grows, the more of that useful info gets indexed on the search engines and so the more people who need that info will find us........and when they arrive, they will also find that we are a warm and caring community that always has the welcome mat out and the light on :)
(and the only online community with a resident yappy monkey who also dispenses comfort food:D)

I love the ideas about the homepage here and will look toward doing something along the lines suggested.

Spread the word about NeuroTalk! The best way for others to learn of this community is really through you -- word of mouth. Nothing speaks more strongly than your endorsement.

John

Google:
 

I have been searching Google for some archives of mine, and others from OBT.

Today I searched myself (mrsdoubtfyre magnesium seizures) and my thread here at Neurotalk was the main hit! (nothing from OBT) Actually two pages of links to here.

I posted links to my magnesium and zinc thread here at OBT last week.
I have 30-40 views there and 495 and 110 here respectively. (The zinc thread is much newer in time, so less viewed).

So this place is very active on Google already. Other Google searches are bringing up mrsdoubtfyre here too. So I was going to remove that connection in my signature..BUT if it is bringing people here through searches, I will leave it up a while longer. I will keep the font faint however, to minimize the "old name".

I plan on several other threads in the Vit forum on other nutrients. This should help too. I am sorry, I am not the "social" type, conversational type like one sees on chats etc, so this will be my contribution.:o

jccglutenfree and rose also are showing up first on several Google searches I did on their subjects.

Something else that helps get us up in the search engines...

If we all use desrciptive titles on our postings when the "bots" crawl sites they pick this type of thing up.

Such as instead of posting "question on meds" we could post "question on Topamax" this way the "bots" would pick up on the word topamax so when someone is serching for info on this particular drug we would come up in the search and hopefully bring new members.

In my opinion this really works very good I have done this myself for a few years.

Just a thought...
I am not saying we are not doing this already...just something to keep in the back of our minds...


hugs

I think that if we had a quick and easy website, it would be easier to spread the word about NT in 'real life'.

I had a neighbor the other day who came over to ask me for help finding info about migraine headaches and TMJ... I had to ask for an email addy to be able to send her a link to neurotalk because the website is a bit long to just write down or remember. (neurotalk.org says it is under construction - will it ever be available to us?).

If you put Neurotalk in your search bar this site comes up with ease.:D

yes, putting neurotalk into google is easy enough... but I always thought that saying to someone "this is the website" is better than saying "type this into google"...

But, if neurotalk.org will not be available, then giving folks the name to type into google is easy enough.

One of the things I have always done with good online resources is to print out a one page description of the site and put in on the bulletin boards or waiting room end tables at my doctors offices and at the pharmacy...

I would like to do that with neurotalk, and it would look better and be easier for folks to remember if the description and website name said "neurotalk.org"