Social Networking in New England
Three Step Guide to Building a Social Network

Sunday, April 13, 2008 in Shorts & Rants
Tags: Community Building, Content Management, Social Blogging, Social Networking

Shorts & Rants: Community Building Made Easy

Skills Required: Can you write an eMail?

Technology Required: Do you have a PC or Laptop?

Annual Cost: Do you have $90.00?

* Domain Name: $10.00 (GoDaddy Domain Services)

* Linux Hosting: $45.00 (GoDaddy Hosting Control Center)

* Site Template: $35.00 (Joomla Website Templates)

If you can write an email and you have a laptop or PC — you can launch your own social networking site. Chances are pretty good you’ve never heard the terms Open Source, Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL and host of other terms. All you need to know is that many of the networking sites that I’ve written about are built on publishing platforms called Content Management Systems (CMS). These platforms are designed to allow you to host and create your on website for the cost of a video game.

I’ve been involved with several corporate projects involving multi-million dollar investments in software, hardware and staff resources to launch various knowledge management, project management, and content management platforms. I can tell you from personal experience that this “how to guide” will deliver the same amount of functionality at a fraction of the cost with phenomenal design.

Step 1: Define Your Business Need

Don’t choose your technology until define your business objective. The tools I am about to present will save you thousands of dollars and give you more control over your site. You will be able to dynamically publish content directly to your site without having to hire a web designer. In fact, you can tell them to hit the road because you will be able to manage all kinds of content changes. What is your business need? A retail site, newspaper site, magazine site, golf pro site, message board site, or are you trying to build a social networking community? Once you’ve identified your business need go ahead and purchase your domain from GoDaddy or another domain registration service. I’ve used a few over the years and GoDaddy offers very reasonable rates. More importantly they have one of the most well rounded package of services and they won’t nickel and dime you on simple things like site forwarding, site masking, email and other services. They also have the best customer service in the industry. When you have a question, they are available 24/7 to answer it. Cost: GoDaddy Domain Registration ($9.95)

Step 2: Select a Hosting Provider

If you are going to launch a website, you are going to need a hosting provider. Why? Your hosting provider is going to make this as simple as registering for a hosting plan (choose a basic plan). Again, I chose GoDaddy but their are others. GoDaddy is going to offer you servers using an operating system called Linux, software publishing platform called Joomla, MySQL database to help manage all the content on your site, and PHP software to display your actual site. Lets face it, unless you are software engineer its unlikely you will have the time to assemble all the resources and purchase all the tools necessary to successfully launch a website. Fortunately, GoDaddy has assembled all these resources into a package of services that allows you to launch these tools in about 2 minutes. Cost: GoDaddy Hosting Connection ($45.00)

Step 2: Select a Content Management System

There are 10s of thousands of software developers, systems engineers and others who spend countless hours working in small groups all over the world to develop software based on Open Source standards. How does this benefit you? Simple, unlike commercial software developers who use proprietary source code to develop their products and charge you a fortune – open source developers develop software for use by their community. Which means you can use their software for FREE. Its one of the world’s most successful cultural revolutions.

Now that you have registered for Linux Hosting Connection all you have to do is download an application and let GoDaddy do the rest. Hosting your own website allows you to customize your site and accept advertising. GoDaddy offers advertising tools, blogging tools, content management (publishing), eCommerce (retail), galleries (pictures), message boards/forums, project management, and wikis (dictionaries). Since my focus is on Community Building and Social Networking we are going to take a look at Joomla.

Joomla is a publishing tool that allows you to manage not just publishing articles like in a blog, but also hosting content like video, audio, streaming media, live webcam, and more. I choose Joomla because they offer complete sites based off a defined business need, great design, and all the extras right out-of-the box. They even populate your site with sample content that you can easily edit and replace. The end result – in less than an hour your networking site is live. All you have to is select Joomla and press install. GoDaddy does all the rest.

Step 3: Choose a Template

When you visit GoDaddy you will note that there are several popular publishing tools. After spending a week and about 40 hours evaluating each of them, I picked Joomla. This CMS platform has templates defined based on a business need. The other platforms organize their templates based on design philosophy. I looked through 100s of templates before I realized that 90% of them are simply well designed blogs. If you are interested in Community Building or Social Networking take a look at the following templates: Comuna Plaza, Comuna2 Plaza, and SocioPlaza.

You will need to join a professional template club in order to download one of these templates. These clubs were formed to service a community of web designers who resell these tools to people like you and me. Some of these consultants are more reasonable than others, but if you paid someone to create one of these sites it might run you between $500 to $3000. If you spent the $90 dollars I recommended and played with these tools – you’d quickly see why so many web designers offer them to their clients. Cost: Professional Joomla Template Club $35.00.

Your done. Not really, now you have write, moderate, recruit and drive participation in your community. Don’t believe it is possible? Here are a number of sites using content management systems to manage their communities: FastCompany (Publisher), Popular Science (Publisher), Mike Bloomberg (Politician), Britney Spears, ChannelMETV, SugarNetwork, iFoodTV, wikivorce