How to set up and build a community website [Part I]

[this is a live report for a project to be launched early 2007]

As I am busy building a new community website for expats working and residing in the Netherlands, I think it wise to share my workflow for creating this website and building the community itself.

Preparation
My preparation started about half a year ago. While playing with the thought of creating a community based website, one thing was already clear: The site would need expat members. So all I did was launching an one-page website on the specific domain, with some subject related content, a line of adsense ads (revival of the 1-page adsense website) and… the most important… I put up a mailinglist.

People can sign-up to receive information on the launch of the actual community site, which gives me a nice targetgroup of potential members.

Off-line preps
As this is a website for a quite specific targetgroup, I choose to approach an off-line network of people that might provide both content and members.
So, I am preparing to contact:

  • different international companies located in the Netherlands
  • governmental agencies involved in international affairs and international trade
  • municipal agencies involved with expats and expat info+housing of the 3 big cities

Research/Role-models
First, and very important, I took a very good look at the (possible) competition. The few websites available for expats (1 big one and a few clones) all offer more or less the same: Dutch news in english language, city-, housing- and legal information, some classifieds and some kind of forum for the interaction.
Another fact is that all competition has websites with an old-fashioned layout (very small in width) and most content comes from the team that built and maintains the site.

While preparing and building this site of mine, I have some very nice example I keep in mind while doing this. Already some time ago I got notice of the very fast growing community of TEAMSUGAR, part of the Sugar Publishing series of websites: POPSUGAR, DEARSUGAR, FITSUGAR, etc.

Teamsugar is a very user- and visitorfriendly example of how a community site should look and feel. Many of the elements I point out in the following overview have been derived from TEAMSUGAR.

Core
I am building this site on a heavily loaded version 5.0 of Drupal. Not only because TEAMSUGAR is powered by Drupal, but also because working with this module enabled piece of high-end open source software simply is a breeze.
I am no web-, tech-, net-, PHP-, HTML- nor CSS-specialist, but Drupal brings a lot of power and capabilities in an extremely adminfriendly package.

Furthermore, while I am building this alone, I might as well have a very large and quickly responding community behind me for guidance and backup.

Features
With this community, I am aiming to launch a website that already has all the stuff members usually ask for. So I envisioned myself as expat and surfed different websites to pick those specific elements that would appeal most to me in that role.

Before putting down this list, which I will do in Part II, I ask you to comment and provide the features you would want to see in a community.

Some pointers: Expat, foreign language, housing, community, blog, homefront, Netherlands, cities…
So please: shoot!

[Part II coming up beginning next week!]

4 Comments on “How to set up and build a community website [Part I]”

  • Hi Jan,

    My guess is, if I were an expat, I’d love to get some “real life” advise on the simple things I should know.

    E.g. where’s the bank, who’s the manager, where do my kids go to school, is it a good one, what’s the best hairdresser around and where do I go to get absolutely drunk and still have a good time.
    That means you would need a large community of not only expats but locals too. They can supply the answers to all of those questions.

    Furthermore, I’d look for specialists in the fields you already mentioned. I myself volunteer for the real-estate / housing and mortgage things.

    Talk to you later. Kiss Babette for me…
    Bye
    Eric

  • Thanks Eric,

    Good point of view. Especially mentioning the involvement of “locals” is a point I had not taken into account, apart from local organizations.

    My thought is/was that if a expat has all options to share his experience, it would generate a focused discussion automatically.

    I will ponder on this for a while.

    Thanks and will kiss B. for sure… =)

  • Hi Jan,

    As soon as the expat community is large enough, it will become selfsupporting for the larger part. You won’t need the locals to answer all of the daily questions. The expats will answer them amongst themselves.
    But for some specialised areas you will always need people with access to certain sources.

    In real estate, for instance, you need an expert with access to some large real estate databases. And in mortgage you would need someone who is always up-to-date on legal and tax matters.
    These are things that constantly keep changing and my guess is, it’s better to provide no info at all rather than giving people the wrong or outdated information.

    Sounds like a fun project and with a lot of research and hard work it could be a real business opportunity.

    Regards
    Eric

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