Ed: “I could probably get rid of the top menu altogether”
I did wonder about that myself.
I normally visit the site on desktop, where it makes reasonable sense in its current form. But when you mentioned tuning it for mobile view I sent the home page to my phone.
In mobile view, a third of the screen is taken up with the header and top menu, another third is taken up with the orange panel and the bottom third is taken up by “welcome to our community site”. Only after scrolling down do you get to any actual content. It takes a lot of scrolling to get to any actual content. But initially, that mobile user sees very little of what I see at first glance on a desktop screen. So, that “top left corner” of the desktop screen needs to contain something very compelling when it appears on its own to encourage people to scroll down further.
Perhaps the home page needs a completely different layout to the rest of the site. A landing page dominated by a photo and story that changes every day from a list of top articles. So the site looks different at every visit, even if, at first, nobody is contributing anything new.
Is there a mechanism that could automatically embed a random blog or forum post on the home page?