Online Communities - The Heart of Olive Net

Our Experience

Since 2002 Olive Net has been building community websites. We have evolved through eight different community software applications and now use three of these, a community oriented CMS (Dragonfly), wiki software (Mediawiki) and a live chat system (FlashChat).

What is Community Software?

Online communities range from the very traditional mailing list (an email is sent to group with related interests) through to advance social networking software such as Facebook.

Building a Community Website

Community websites are so common that there is a vast amount of free software available to use. The tools are there for even the most sophisticated of networking sites; perhaps best known is Google's Open Social.

Getting a forum or blog running online can be a job of less than half an hour and can be done for almost nothing. Customizing your new site to look and feel exactly how you wish takes considerably longer, and this is where you would normally consider employing a web development and design agency such as Olive Net. If you think you might benefit from our help then please do contact us.

Case Study - Rear Party

Rear Party is Olive Net's forum site for the friends and family of the British military. It is the smallest of our forum sites and uses a modified version of the Dragonfly Content Management System.

Rear Party - Stylish and friendly.

Requirements

The site was to be a high quality, secure forum with a chat area. Style was important; the audience would be mainly female audience and aesthetics assumed a greater importance than in our other community sites. Finally the site needed to look friendly and welcoming.

The Solution

Olive Net decided to continue using the Dragonfly Content Management System used on our other community sites. This ensured a simple implementation, but Dragonfly is not visually attractive in standard form so considerable work was need on the site 'theme' (the look, or skin). This design work followed the normal sequence of pure graphic design, followed by screen designs (mock-ups of the finished website) and then the final transfer to the CMS as a 'theme'.

As with our other community sites functional modification was also needed. The entire Dragonfly front page was discarded and a completely new page created. This draws content from various parts of the site as well as externally from our other communities (the aim is to encourage users to browse around). Additionally forum modifications were added to show advertisements and add some functions not offered by Dragonfly as standard.

The last step was to log in to the now live system as an administrator, create the site content (mainly forums such as "Current Affairs") and set up software options such as whether registration is necessary to use the site.

Assessment

Dragonfly has once again worked well for Rear Party and the result is an attractive, secure and popular site with a minimal administrative overhead. Other forum systems are available which offer more functionality and are more attractive as standard, so we would recommend professional set-up and design for any Dragonfly site. For DIY forum owners, a system such as PHPBB may be a better choice.

Time / Cost

Olive Net would charge from £3000 - £5000 to create a community forum site such as Rear Party with a custom design and functional changes. Implementation time from initial planning meeting to live site can be as little as one month.

DIY note - to quickly start a forum site with standard look and function, you would need to do the following:

• Learn the very basics of HTML and website hosting. This should take no more than two days of reading and playing.
• Get a hosting package (eg. from Fasthosts) with a MySQL database (normally an option) and PHP and Perl languages allowed. These allow your site to do the number crunching necessary to run. This should be no more than £20 per month.
• Download a piece of free open-source forum software, eg Dragonfly.
• Install an FTP client such as Smart FTP. This is a piece of software that allows you to send things to your new hosting account server, and upload Dragonfly as described in the installation instructions and in your hosting FAQ
• Follow the installation instructions and refer to the support forums for Dragonfly or your chosen software when necessary.

Olive Net are always pleased to offer advice to DIYers. Just contact us.