Making my own (LARGE) social network community website

I have a plan to make a nonprofit community website with social networking features and I'm somewhat indecisive on how to go about doing it. The members of the website are young people with life-threatening diseases, a significant population worldwide and one that largely lacks a voice. This is something very dear to me for certain personal reasons and something I really want to build and perfect but I'm not sure how to design such a site.

My initial vision of the site was something like a facebook group page. It would almost be like a central blog where every member could sign up to post and comment. Ideally there would also be messaging and "friending" or "following" features. To honest I'm not really sure how practical this is with larger communities. I've already connected with a number of people, some of whom have some pretty significant connections and I plan to contact hospitals, organizations, and certain celebrities in the future. I'm just not sure if that type of website would work with a large group of people. I'm hesitant to make it a forum since my goal is to let people share their stories with everyone, not just the few people who read their thread, or look in the topic but I am open to any thoughts or ideas.

I'm also kind of confused over which program I should use. I really want to make the website presentable and more importantly inviting and conducive to interactions among members. I've found Wordpress/Buddypress to be complicated to really customize, especially for someone like me with pretty limited coding knowledge. I've also looked into somewhat smaller companies like SocialEngine and Ning which seem viable and easy but strangely unpopular. I want the website to reach a wide audience and I care very deeply about the final result so I did find the lack of successful websites from these programs troubling. I'd even be willing to try crowdfunding if that meant I could hire someone more apt than I am to make something spectacular but I can't really say how practical that is either. If anyone has ideas or opinions on my vision for the website or alternative designs and on the best program to carry out these designs, that would be a huge help and greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance everyone.

 

Good luck with this project.

 

Good luck, the project looks complexly

 

What a brilliant idea! I think this network will be really useful and supportive for the users.
My advice - you need to hire someone experienced not only to work on your website but also to teach you. Anyway your project looks very solid, so you will have a lot of tasks.
I wish you all the best! Hope to hear about your network soon!

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence! I'll ask around to find a good developer and get the network started. Hopefully it will all work out well.

 

What will you offer that a Facebook group wouldn't?

Why not test your method with a Facebook group, then - when you have about 50,000 or so active members - you can create the website knowing that you can invite everyone in the group over to your new site.

This will take most of the audience building out of the equation and you can start earning back the development costs via advertising almost immediately.

Plus - thousands of signups in your first week after launch will be a heck of an email list!

Also, as you go along - you can ask members of the Facebook group for their advice on what they would/wouldn't like added - you can update them on the progress and get them excited about the launch - this is called pre-selling and it's VERY important!

Best of luck to you

 

Thanks! Sorry for the late reply. That does seem like a good idea and I've been thinking of beginning with facebook. I was initially hesitant to gather people without having my complete website to show them but if I incorporate them into the making of the website it might hold them over until I have something more. My website would have most of the same features as those on facebook but it would stay more focused on the illness aspect with various events online and potentially in real-life that would give them a chance to speak about their experiences.

 

share link here when it's live

 

The best Comment here is from Matt, he is on the Dot with this, i think you should go for his advice because it better to be Safe then Sorry.
Good Luck!!

 

My advice to you would be very careful not to do things backwards and try to fit your ideas around current conventions and instead make things work around the needs of your Idea. What I would suggest is starting out with a project plan working out how this would ideally work and fit together, then go out and find the tools or means of how to construct it and make it a reality. For a smaller community for sharing stories and basic connecting you could look at something like Expressionengine. For larger, more Facebook like social networks you may be thinking about Socialengine or PHPfox. All though, it does sound like you may be envisioning something in the middle. Just a note, I'm actually selling a Socialengine license / account, which i'm not sure I should say here because i'll be putting it in the market place soon, but let me know if you are interested.

Another thing to consider is how the site makes a revenue. Now I know that it is non profit, but there is most definitely running costs, and costs you have probably not considered as well as cost involved in growing the site when it gets bigger. Obviously you will have to consider monthly server costs, but you may need to consider offsetting content and bandwidth to a service like Amazon Web Services because it can mount up. You may also need a CDN for base files to speed up the site. So you will want to consider donations or advertising.

 

Goodluck. I'm looking forward to check it out when it's live.

 

best advice is be admin and dont let anyone know your the boss!

 

Socialengine socialengine.com is the best social network software this year! And SocialEngineMarket are great developers! http://socialenginemarket.com/