Believe it or not, Sci­ence For Amer­ica was my first web­site. I’ve cre­ated four now– def­i­nitely still a new­bie– but I’ve come to appre­ci­ate the rel­a­tive ease of cre­at­ing web­sites and appli­ca­tions using tech­nolo­gies like con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems, blog­ging plat­forms and devel­op­ment frameworks.

While I think the design of Sci­ence For Amer­ica is strong, and the plat­form I built it on is even stronger (Joomla! CMS), I’ve learned a few things about try­ing to cre­ate a social net­work that I’d like to share with you.

One…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes time. Both time on a day-by-day basis, and also time in the sense of build­ing up the site and brand to get pas­sion­ate vis­i­tors who come back for more. I would attribute the rel­a­tive suc­cess of Sci­ence For Amer­ica to its tenure on the web, now 18 months. I found that ini­tial traf­fic and get­ting the word out was crit­i­cal in the begin­ning, but that after this had started, it sim­ply took time for traf­fic and users to arrive at the site.

Two…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes plan­ning. I used a 20 Ques­tions doc­u­ment to develop the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples for the site. Who are we tar­get­ing? What are the sites’ com­peti­tors? What type of con­tent will be included? All of these were impor­tant in decid­ing the direc­tion of the site.

Three…

Cre­at­ing social net­works takes orga­ni­za­tion. Proper lay­out is crit­i­cal, because you want your user inter­face to be intu­itive. Where can I find sci­ence work­sheets? Where do I go when I want to find links to sci­ence web­sites? All of these ques­tions should really be answered BEFORE you start on the site and through­out the beta phase of devel­op­ment. There are many plat­forms out there– Joomla! and Word­Press to name a cou­ple– that make it rel­a­tively easy to rearrange con­tent and links on web­sites, but it is still a crit­i­cal step to develop at least a rough sketch, wire­frames maybe, of where you are going to have vis­i­tors click to nav­i­gate cer­tain parts of the site.

This is sim­pli­fy­ing things a bit, but I believe if you focus on these three areas, you’ll have a solid site ready for visitors.

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