What are the Best Ways to Build Communities on the Net

| | 3 min read

The idea of an online community has shifted from the goal of basic social exchanges to indispensable vehicles for high-tech professional users to accomplish high-value collaborative endeavors.

To enable your technically adept users to derive value from online exchanges through communities, an effective design is the basic starting point. Today’s Web 2.0 landscape has stringent guidelines for websites and with the complexities demanded from online networking platforms, the challenges multiply considerably:

  • Communities are expected to produce robust, measurable results for competitive businesses, especially with the availability of Open Source platforms.
  • Social media conversations have raised awareness about online collaboration and communication and the need for social networking platforms that provide rich feature sets is felt more than ever.
  • The high occurrence of spam and low-quality discussions, privacy, and security threats have placed immense demands on the underlying technology platforms. Innovative approaches are desirable.

Why Drupal Is Indispensable for High-Performance Networking Platforms

Given the fact that 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month and 50 million tweets are disseminated every day, the act of contemporary content creation by conventional limited-function websites is clearly far from a realistic goal.

Drupal is the #1 solution for smart businesses who want to convert their existing web platform into a community to leverage their brand and automate content publishing:

  • Drupal accounts for one of the most widely chosen community development platforms due to its scalability, flexibility, and short time-to-market features
  • Reliance on a customizable API, elimination of hard-coding and support for high network traffic makes simple community development possible with Drupal
  • Your website can feature role-based task allocation for writing blog posts, comments or other forms of content, eliminating security and privacy issues
  • Support for blogs, the basic unit of content sharing, contact forms and forums is available out-of-the-box
  • With Drupal, you can scale your networking platform to include new feature sets, Organic Groups, Extended Profiles or by adding Blog Themes or Gravatars
  • Traffic demands for websites can be effectively handled through ready-to-go modules

Simple Drupal Modules for the Best Thriving Communities

Simple Drupal modules can help you engage users with the support they need to interact, exchange ideas, collaborate, and accomplish key business tasks:

  • JavaScript and social media links for your networking platform through the Service Links module to help users connect to any major social networking websites including Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Delicious, Digg, Google, Technorati, Reddit, StumbleUpon, MySpace or IceRocket
  • Exclusive Share Bar or Easy Social modules for highly flexible customization of share buttons for any of the major social networking platforms
  • Social Media Links block for enabling popular user tasks, Facebook Like module or Twitter module for microblogging

Zyxware can help you transform your web platform into an online community by helping deploy the right modules that will cater to your requirements. Enabling smart social networking features for your business will help expand your market reach and strengthen your brand. To learn more about how we can help you, get in touch with us!

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