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Creating your own social network for free

Being sociable online

Social networks are all the rage these days, and the chances are you probably already belong to at least one among Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn and so on.

Take a look at this list from Wikipedia if you’re struggling to think of any more, you’ll be surprised at the number.

What if you’d rather create your own social network rather than belong to an existing one - where do you start?

And what if you’re trying to build your own community around your own website and you want to be the one who sets the social networking rules?

That’s where ning.com comes in!

Ning is a website which allows you to create a social network on any topic you please, and it gives you the option of photo galleries, video galleries, forums and blogs.

It has a distinctive web 2.0 feel to it, which basically means it’s easy to use and navigate for non-teccies.

Digging deeper

Firstly, here are a few examples of existing social networks on ning.com:

http://bookmarket.ning.com … ‘The network for book authors and publishers’ (1949 members)

http://community.shoottheday.com … ‘Where thousands of photographers will gather to Shoot! The Day’ (3217 members)

http://mombloggers.ning.com … ‘Where mom bloggers converge’ (membership not given)

I’ve selected three of the more accessible sites - there are some weird social networks out there - but look at the difference in appearance between each of the three sites, they certainly don’t look like ‘off the shelf’ websites.

I think that’s a pretty impressive look, and one worth exploring further.

The one thing I would say - and I was surprised that these social networks haven’t done this yet - is that they should create a redirect on a sexier URL, rather than using the ning.com extension.

So for instance, http://mombloggers.ning.com really ought to be a redirect from http://mombloggersclub.com/, but if you click on the second link, you’ll see it’s parked with GoDaddy, but not yet redirected.

Having said that, look how well the site is doing without it, so who am I to speak?!*

(* I found out the solution to this as I explored the site a little further. Having a custom URL is a Premium service … which means you have to pay extra for it.)

Registering and setting up a social network

Once you’ve registered, which is a quick and painless process, you just have to do a few basic things to set up your social network:

1) Pick a name: Great web design tips

2) Pick a web address: greatwebtips.ning.com

3) Public or private social network: Public (but note you could have a ‘family only’ network for photos, news and blogs)

4) Tagline/Description/Keywords/Language

5) Select preferred layout … there are loads of really good themes to choose from and you can customise each one.

You can also create customised CSS to determine the overall appearance of your website.

6) Select features from Photos, Videos, Forum, Events, Text box, Music, Groups, Notes, Blog, RSS, Gadgets.

Having made those basic selections, you create your new social network … it’s as easy as that.

Here’s the network I created in about 10 minutes:

http://greatwebtips.ning.com/

I think that’s a really impressive bit of kit … it makes me think that no-one really needs to bother building their own websites from scratch anymore, especially if all they’re after is a basic website.

The built-in forum and photo and video handling is excellent … and you don’t have to pay for the bandwidth (though note that your basic account comes with limited bandwidth and excessive use is a premium service).

Also, if you want to use your own Google ads on the site ie ones that you get paid for, you also have to pay for that service as well.

If you just want to run a small, niche site this is well worth a look.

Even if you’re aiming for something a little more ambitious, this is still worth a thorough exploration, just read the small print about what additional services are going to cost you.

One more thing I’d like to see on the site is the ability to bolt in existing blogs to the site, rather than having to write posts within ning.com.

Posted by pt23
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