When building a website, the community aspect of it should be the last thing implemented.

I’ve heard from numerous people that any sort of community technology with in your project should be developed last, and only after there is a need for your audience to interact with each other. I always believed that if the content is excellent, you could start a community oriented website from the beginning and it would have no excuse to fail. I was wrong.

Earlier this year I developed a student website that focused on college life and taking the most out of it. At first I concentrated on creating a forum where all of the students would congregate and communicate with each other, sell their books and trade things they wanted within the campus. The idea is great, but very difficult when it comes to implementing a community in the beginning. After days and weeks of promoting the site on campus only 9 people signed up. I wasn’t about to quit, but I was forced to find a different way of creating this community.

At this point I had a static page that displayed the recent articles, RSS feeds, and links to other parts of my site. The page would be updated (by me)every time I had a new article and it would link to the forum post where it would be discussed. I had a great way of managing the content while focusing on the growth of my online community, what I thought was a win win situation.

Unfortunately, by posting all of my content on the forums, there was no way of classifying my content for others to quickly navigate from the main page. I also lacked interaction between the forum software and the static page, and all of the menial work had to be completed by me. It was a world of copy paste, copy paste.

At this point all I wanted to do was to ditch the forum and concentrate on a pseudo community using Wordpress. By switching over to wordpress I would get the opportunity to create a small community from loyal readers and have all of my content managed in one place. It wasn’t an easy decision, for I had spend more than 3 weeks developing this forum and making it perfect, I didn’t want to throw out something solid and complete.

Online communities take at least 2 to 3 years to mature.

While deciding what to do, I heard many web designers say that a forum takes approximately 2 years to mature compared to a smaller website. This was the trigger that made up my mind. Instead of waiting the year or more to develop my forum community, I can create the site and community using wordpress, and when that receives a greater following just open up the forums that I have completed. It makes complete sense to do this, and hopefully with this new wave of content that I have coming, it will spark conversation and interest to my site.

It took me 3 months and a big failure to stop and listen to others in the field. Creating, feeding, and maintaining forum communities is hardER work compared to managing a wordpress blog site. I am not saying building a forum from the start is absolutely wrong, but If you don’t have the resources and time commitment to invest in a forum community, build a wordpress site and when you receive the necessary amount of people offer them forums. Remember if you have forums and a wordpress site and your forums fail you still have a successfully website to concentrate on.

This is the image that we will recreate. Before we start, I just want to let you know that I am using Photoshop CS2.

Step 1.

Open a new document with the horizontal and vertical dimensions you need for your document. I used 370px by 200px and a transparent background for the back. Now that you have a clear canvas, head over to the toolbar and select the rounded corner rectangle.

* I didn’t go to the edges of the canvas, but you will need an exact measurement with your graphics.

Step 2.

Before you start placing numerous rounded corner boxes all over, you have to pick a color. In the toolbar select the first color box and when you click it a screen will come up and ask you for a color.

After you select a color to use, its time to place the rounded rectangle in the canvas.

When you finish you will have a graphic like the one above. At the present time, the image looks like crap and it has no style. Unless you want to make a site that looks like it came from the 20th century, you have to add taste before you put it on.

Step 3.

Head over to the layers window and on the right select the little black flash icon.
Once you click this icon, a bigger window with more options will apear. Head over to Gradient Overlay which is on the left. When you click on it the gradient options will display on the right and all you have to do is fix the numbers to match the style of graphic that you want. For this project we will use the

• Blend Mode Normal.
• Opacity 55%
• Gradient Black to White.
• Style Linear, check align with layer
• Angle 90 Degrees
• Scale 150%

There you go, you are now finished, you can either add text if you want or “save for web” and ad it to your site as a button.