Ok, so meanness out of the way, because it's true and you needed to hear it.
Imagery really is very important, especially in your home page. You need something there, it needs to look nice too but about half the things in the universe that you could put up there would look better than nothing at all. It is after all your best billboard. Then you need a minibanner, the better it looks the better off your guild is.
Take a look at
These Banners, most of them are fairly simple, just a nice image with a fancy, and appropriate font overlaid in a nice way, it's really as simple as that, even simpler some of the best there are just a logo with fancy-text next to it, I particularly like The Darkness Chronicles', it's especially eye catching and still so simple a modern nine yearold could probably make it. Now, you can always go pay somebody to make one for you, but there's a very good chance they're not as good as a modern nine yearold, and if they are it'll probably cost you as much as the guild did, which by the way, you got screwed on.
Once you've got those two things, a niceish homepage and a minibanner, you need the guild to look like an active community, several threads that have been posted in in the last week at any point, and they should not be bumps. You should have a multitude of threads where people can just pop in and give their opinion, especially on heated topics like who has the best soccer team, if you can try to make them topics where nobody's actually right so nobody can pop in and win the argument. As a member of your crew it's your job to instigate things while keeping them civil, arguments, not fights.
You should have several stickies about content, one for sig-art advertising the guild is usually a must, one for rules, because they really shouldn't be on your homepage, maybe one with guides on how to do stuff sportily, like how to throw a curveball or whatever, I'm not sporty; Then I'd suggest you figure out what sports your community is most centered about and find scores and gametimes and whatnot, it'll help people get involved.
As time goes on certain sports will definitely show dominance and you should create subforums for them; DONT DO THIS NOW. It will dilute your community and prevent growth. Wait until you've got a few dozen members, and if there's only one sport anybody in the guild cares about, you'd be better off reorienting the guild to it specifically.
Then, you Must put in a lot of effort outside the guild trying to draw in new members, make and bump ad threads wherever you're allowed to, only in other guilds if it explicitly says you can, and keep at it, growing a guild is hard and you've been working for something around two weeks, if that, of course your guild sucks, it's brand spanking new!
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