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.