Social Media Site-templates and coding?

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ooh – not sure if you’ve done this already, but if not, i would really have a more detailed conversation with your client as to what their needs are and see if something like their own social network site is really the solution to their goal. this is definitely not a case of “build it and they will come.”

why wouldn’t leveraging the existing king (for better or for worse) of social media (facebook) be desirable? you can build the best custom site in the world, but users won’t come to it if they are already using another site to do the same thing…

as to templates, etc. – i’d start using a basic forum such as phpbb or the likes. it won’t be a “social media site”, but it will offer a lot of the same functionality, such as posts, commenting, media uploads, etc…

hope that helps!

sitruc

[Fernando Mol]

I’ll go with Curtis recommendation. Create a Facebook page and a Twitter account for the client. Then, you can add a blog to the actual company site and insert buttons to share posts in Facebook and Twitter.

If you use something like WordPress to create the blog, there are widgets to display your actual twits and Facebook status on your page.

Not any of these options are particularly difficult to implement, but Social Networking can be a full time job, so consider having somebody that will post, review, answer to comments and be up to date with the company latest news.

I hope this helps

[Richard Williams]

Also agree…

Are you familiar with Word Press? I recently did a site for a company’s intranet which was all about posting up events, allowing people to comment and track progress etc, all done in wordpress and it SOOOOOOOO easy… once you familiarise yourself with it :o))

Richard Williams
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[Ryan Schultz]

Hey Curtis,

Thanks for your feedback…I have discussed the social network…solution issue. It is the infrastructural base that is needed it’s not really going to be a social networking site.

I came across a packaged solution (NING)- that seems like it might work although bandwidth may eventually be a problem as they max at 200GB w/ only 20GB storage.

I will check into phpbb.

Thanks again