Building Community Websites With Joomla - Case Study: My Puget Sound

Presented by: Christopher Nielsen

http://youtu.be/3-MpXwMimWg

Comment (0) Read More...

Part Four: Building Revenue Streams

For any community to be self-sustaining it will need to have some type of revenue stream(s). Even volunteer based communities require funding to keep relevance and growth. There are always tradeoffs with how to approach this since visitors do not want to be blasted with more ads than content and advertisers want to have the best possible exposure. With the same token not everyone that adds value to your community is willing to pay to be a member. Picking the right model and strategy can significantly affect your success or failure.

• How do I plan to build my membership model and how does it fit with my base user?   
• How much would members be willing to pay for each tier of benefits?   
• Where would I place advertising or sponsorship?   
• Are there limitations on or conflicts with certain types of advertisers?   
• How will I manage the transactions?   
• What disclosures or legal disclaimers are required?
• Will I have affiliate, partner or reseller programs?   
• Where does my community add value to an advertiser?

Comment (0) Read More...

Part Three: Marketing, Audience and Incentives

Connecting with the right people or networks

When you consider building a community site with Joomla CMS  or any other technology for that matter, you have to make sure you understand what social or professional need you are filling and where your members will be coming from.  What are the average or common demographic profile elements? You will need to make sure your community “type” or “model” is right for the audience that you want to serve and that you configure your tools and presentation accordingly.

• Is the group or industry mostly male or female, younger or older and what special interests do they all have in common?    
• What will be the glue that holds them together in a community and attracts new members to join?
• How will you capture and keep their attention?
• What information will you need to push to them or gather from them?
• What key benefits make your community save them time, money or frustration, or give them a sense of pride to participate in?

Once you have a clear demographic profile of your intended community you will be able to create incentive programs and key selling propositions for marketing your community to the world, even if this world is a small niche market or private membership for an organization. 

Comment (0) Read More...

Part Two: The right tools and user experience

Community Building Extensions and Customer Experience Using Joomla CMS

When building out your technology platform for a community site using Joomla! CMS you have several options for extensions that you can use. The two most popular are: www.jomsocial.com and www.joomlapolis.com. Each has benefits or strengths depending on the type of community you are building and the priorities of how the data associated with user profiles will be handled.

Essentially what these extensions do is, they allow you to build “buckets” of information (extended profile fields) associated with a user profile. These profile fields are linked with the Joomla user profile and authentication system. For example; JomSocial organizes this information differently than Community Builder and thus giving you alternate ways of displaying your profile related content. Comparisons will be beyond the scope of this article but you should make sure that you take the time to evaluate each of these extensions suites based on some the following criteria:

• How will I need to present profile information?
• Will I need lists or to segment information from profiles into reports?
• How will users collaborate in the system and what features do they need?
• Will they be sharing files and photos?
• How do their systems integrate with the priority social networks you will connect with?
• How comfortable are the system administrators with either of the tool suites?
• Which templates will best support your goals for the look and feel and how will they look?
• What other extension will be used and are they compatible with them?
• How will they affect my intended user experience?

I am sure there are other questions that can be asked but either way you should make sure you do a careful evaluation with your developers and stakeholders.

Once you have chosen the most appropriate Community extensions and are comfortable with how they integrate with other potential extensions in your strategy you can start building.

User experience:

Some of the important aspects to consider for users when they first get to your site are:

• Will this be easy for them to join and participate in?
• Is there any information related to the membership sign up process that you need to communicate?
• When in the interaction is the best place for this all to happen?

Careful consideration of the content and information that your users see when they first get introduced to your community will leave a lasting impression as they continue to the next steps of exploring what they can get from participating.

Pace the roll out of your bells and whistles:

It is very easy to overwhelm your users with too much information or too many features all at once. One effective strategy is to have regular updates and frequently add something new and exciting for users when they return to your site.Consider rolling out features over time and swapping out call to action images without losing consistency. Select your priority features to push first and then consider adding new features every month or week over a period of time. This gives you opportunity to tease and excite visitors and may actually create some groundswell of conversation that will help enthusiasm for your community.

Respond quickly:

You will need to keep a sharp ear open to your community. If you are hearing folks are having a difficult time with using some of your features or if there are technical issues you should be prepared to respond very quickly. Not doing so could cause irreversible damage to any momentum you have been building within your community. Responding to new feature requests and communicating promptly will also build loyalty within your community and encourage referrals from within. If you are not listening remember there is a lot of competition for where your users can spend their time online these days.

For more information on Building Communities with Joomla CMS see other related articles in this series.

Part One: Starting with a plan

Part Three: Marketing, Audience and Incentives

Part Four: Building Revenue Streams

Christopher Nielsen is the CEO/General Manager for www.cnpintegrations.com and will be a featured speaker at the Joomla Day Chicago event August 10th 2012.

For more information on the myPugetSound.net Case Study presentation about building communities with Joomla! CMS visit: http://joomladaychicago.com

Comment (0) Read More...

Mobile applications are growing in popularity and it is becoming increasingly important now that you tailor your web portal to be supported in mobile environments. Fortunately Joomla! CMS has several extensions and template configurations that will offer this capability.

Start with a smart template:

Using a third party template vender for your design foundation can save you a ton of time and money when implementing a mobile strategy for your site.  Rocket Theme or YooTheme templates for are a good example of template venders that have built in features for presenting your portal on mobile devices. You are allowed in these templates to configure primary menus for a mobile user which allows you to segment content just for your mobile user. This is often a good idea if you have a portal that leverages a lot of 3^rd party components since not all components will display as well as others in a mobile browser. There is also a great component/template extension called “MobileJoomla” which is simple to install and works pretty much right out of the box. It is very important to test and view your portal on the targeted mobile devices so you can see what your users are seeing and adjust where required to create an optimized mobile user experience.

Comment (0) Read More...