The options for adding community features to your web site seem to multiply every day.  You know you need to add social features to your web site, but how? 

1 - Assessment - What are your goals?  What are the opportunities to enhance your web site’s value with social features and create a community for your clients, users, and/or site visitors?  Review of your goals and the opportunities, then prioritize them so you know which features have the most potential value.  Also determine your desired timing and budget range.

2 - Technology Approach - There are 3 main ways you can enhance your site. One is to pay a developer to do custom work.  Another is to cobble together various single-purpose functions.  The third is to select an integrated platform.  Today, there are many comprehensive platforms wihich range from low cost, all the way up to high-end systems.  Given the variety of integrated solutions, price points, and the benefits they provide, it usually makes the most sense to select a platform. 

3 - Platform Selection - With almost 100 options available today, selecting a platform can be an intimidating task.  Find a partner who is familiar with the range of options and who can help you select the platform that best matches your needs and your budget.  We maintain an index of over 80 different platform options as well as separate lists of specific single-purpose technical solutions.

4 - Planning - Next plan out your desired site changes and enhancements by grouping them into phases.  It’s important to group the changes into manageable sets which you can implement incrementally.  This helps you deliver enhancements in a reasonable time period and helps prove the technology and allow the site development team to gain experience at a reasonable pace.  If you try to do too much all at once, it can be overwhelming and often results in missed schedules and cost overruns.  A good rule of thumb is to keep each phase to about 8 weeks in length.  This is long enough to make solid progress, but not so big that the team can get too far off track.

5 - Design - All web site work should, at least, go through a review or redesign that includes visual design, navigational structure, and user interface (UI) design.

6 - Implementation - The technical team takes the plan, the designs, the selected platform, and implements the new functionality.

7 - Training - Be sure to plan for who will update the new features of your web site, write blog entries, moderate group postings, and such.  Training the team is essential to a successful relaunch.

8 - Testing - Plan to test all of your site’s new features and your site launch/release process.

9 - Site Relaunch - If you have prepared properly, everything surrounding your site launch or relaunch should go smoothly.

10 - Site/Community Promotion - It’s time to announce your new site and its new features.  Be sure to set reasonable expectations.  All of the big online success stories took time to build up steam.

If you plan ahead, use a good process, and work with a knowledgable team, your web project has the best chance to be successful and get delivered on time and on budget.

Ben Huh, the guy behind ICanHasCheezBurger.com, created a community which now numbers over 1 million unique visitors a month, all from funny cat pictures with captions.  I kid you not.  He knows what he’s talking about.  His monthly uniques almost tripled in 2008.

How did he do it?  Well, here are 15 of his top tips.

One of the web’s most unique sites also comes with the most unusual name, I Can Has Cheezburger (dot-com).  The name comes from one of the captions on the jillions of crazy cat pictures found on the site.  You can browse the pictures, copy them to your site/blog/profile, or create your own funny caption in 3 easy steps.  (And remember cats have poor grammar and spelling abilities.)

Ben knows what he’s talking about.  Here is a summary of his 15 keys to building a community.  The link to the full post is at the bottom.

1. Convert Casual Users into Fans

The number one rule of creating a great community is to enable people to share the positive experience that they’ve had on your site. Your aim should be to convert casual users into fans because fans are the ones that will share your content with others.

2. Love on Your Existing Fans, but Not Too Much

3. Empower your Users

4. Make More People Happy

5. Stop Engineering and Start Thinking About the Market

6. Don’t Skimp on Great Content

7. Provide Ways to Give Feedback

8. Power of Little

Offer users lots of small, simple things to do on your site that don’t require login, such as rating, commenting, saving a favorite, creating an account and finally (hopefully) they will do the most difficult thing of all, contribute to your site.

9. Encourage ‘Thefting’

10. Be Willing to Prune Your Community

11. Measure the Number of Shared Experiences, not Users

12. Shared Experiences = Goodwill

13. Create Info Porn

People love to look at data about themselves. It the reason why there is a mirror in practically every elevator that you’ve been in. If you have data about your user’s behavior on your site then show it to them. Update it on a daily basis and they will come back on a daily basis. One of the most popular pages on Lol cats is the page that tells people how many ‘fans’ they have.

14. Don’t Pay Contributors

15. Don’t Confuse Sharing with Marketing

When your users share content with others they are not marketing. They don’t even think about it in that way and in turn you shouldn’t treat them as marketers. Don’t force marketing messages at them, it will burn their trust.

See the full post here.

Here’s a link to his site’s unique visitor stats for 2008 at Compete.com.

Check out www.ICanHasCheezburger.com here.