Social Networking Website Design
The most important step to take with your new
social networking website is to summarize your concept; describe what
purpose your social website serves. For
example, will it serve to connect new parents looking for advice?.
Before you get too carried away, create a MUST HAVE LIST and a WISH
LIST. Your Must Have List is the nuts and bolts or bare minimum
requirements for your new website. Your Wish List consists of all
the bells and whistles you would like to have as your budget allows,
or down the road as your social website grows.
Describe how your website works. You should outline
the functions of your social website. Pretend as if you were going
back in time and explaining to someone how Face book works. Don't
forget to create a visual schematic.
Explain how it works in detail. List out all the
things you want to incorporate.
• Instant chat, public chat rooms, private chat rooms?
• Instant Messaging connections and integration into Face
Book, Twitter, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and so on?
• Can members upload photos or can users embed slide shows
from Google Picasa?
• Can members send each other private messages?
• Can members upload videos or embed videos from 3rd party
websites such as You Tube?
Educate yourself with the applications that can
be customized to fit your needs. A few of these include: Dot Net
Nuke, Joomla, Drupal, Word Press, Magento and many others. In some
cases it makes perfect sense to use these 3rd party software applications
in your website development versus using a custom programmed application
from scratch.
Using and customizing 3rd party applications help to keep costs
down depending on your specific programming needs. Original programming
and code base is much more expensive and takes longer to prepare
and execute.
NOTE: Ask your web designer if they have experience to program
in multiple applications. If they sell you on one particular software,
then ask if they have the programming experience to modify or customize
the software to fit your particular needs.
At the end of the day, even the planning is going
to miss some points. This is where an experienced web developer
will help to ask the questions of your requirements to help you
to tightly fine-tune your planning.
Once all this is done you can move forward with the confidence.
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