Writen by David Feinleib
Today, it's easy to create a static web site. But on the surface it appears hard to create a dynamic, community based web site. Why create a community web site? Because it means that your users will be able to interact with your site rather than just view it. They will be able to add content, upload photos, post their own profiles, and even talk to each other via chat or instant messaging.
Online communities are all around us. Practically everyone has heard of MySpace and Yahoo Groups. If you're putting a web site up, however, why not hold onto your users rather than forcing them to go to another web site to share information and talk to each other? If you don't give your users the ability to do what they want on your web site, they will go elsewhere, and you will lose the ability to interact with them and see what they have to say. Moreover, every time one of the visitors to your web site posts some content, it makes your site more attractive to the search engines, which delivers more traffic to your site, resulting in more business for you.
Building a community web site is easy and can be free with the right software. Open source software, which is free of charge, makes it possible for you to get a community web site up and running in a matter of minutes or hours. You can think of a community web site much like a blog, except that instead of you being the only person who can post content, all visitors to your web site can post content too! That means you don't have to stay up trying to create page after page: your users will do that for you.
The open source software program drupal is a popular system for putting communities online. Drupal supports a wide variety of features, from basic content uploading, to support for user profiles, chatting, tagging, and voting. Suppose you're creating a web site about travel. With a community based travel web site, your users can talk about their own experiences too and vote on places to stay and things to see and do.
Among the many advantages of drupal is that you can start off with basic functionality and then add modules to enhance the core feature set. You can even design your own custom modules (or have others design custom modules for you) to enable new functionality.
Get started today building a dynamic, community based Web 2.0 web site rather than a static, non-interactive Web 1.0 web site!
David Feinleib is the author of the popular blog http://www.vcmba.com. He hosts an online home ownership community at http://www.homeownershiponline.com.
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