In my opinion the main thing is to have a “theme” or purpose for the guild. It can be literally anything from aiming to place in PvP tournaments to helping members level up and learn the game to throwing naked dance parties in Metrica Province on Thursdays.
But the point is to have something to make you stand out from other guilds and give the members a common interest, beyond being Guild Wars 2 players. There are 1001 guilds out there who claim to be friendly, to play every game mode, who have a guild hall, a TS/Vent/Mumble/whatever, do guild missions and honestly their recruitment messages are pretty much interchangable and it almost doesn’t matter which of them you join.
Which means people will join at random, leave almost as randomly and it becomes virtually impossible to form a cohesive group that actually talks to each other beyond brief questions about whose doing what or trying to find another person for a group.
I strongly recommend thinking about what you want from your guild and making that the focus because your members are going to expect you to do it regularly, whether it’s a particular game mode or simply being active in chat.
Also while you, as the leader, will be a sort of focal point I strongly recommend appointing officers to delegate to as soon as you have some people you feel confident you can trust and encouraging members to do things with each other as much as possible. I’ve now been in 2 brilliant guilds which fell apart because basically everyone was friends with the leader and sort-of friends with each other so as soon as the leader couldn’t be on every day the guild stopped functioning.
On a related note make sure at least 1 other person (who you need to really trust) has all the permissions, just in case something happens and you can’t get online (or accidentally leave the guild).
Danielle Aurorel, Dear Dragon We Got Your Cookies [Nom], Desolation (EU).
“Life’s a journey, not a destination.”
There are NO rules for how to make your guild.. that’s all up to you