Make your own social network for free - My experiences

Making a social network is not as difficult as you may think. About two years ago I saw an opportunity for a social network for Tefl teachers in Madrid. I felt that a lot of private academies were acting as middle men between English teachers and English students and were taking a large cut of the hourly rate for doing very little. This was artificially inflating the cost of the classes and deflating the hourly rate the teachers earned. I can’t say this was the case with every academy in Madrid but it certainly was the case with a vast majority. I felt that a website where teachers could build a profile to advertise their services for free while also communicating with other teachers could be a success.

I had previous experience with both Wordpress and Joomla but felt a project of this magnitude was out of my league. I approached a number of different website design companies to see how much it would cost. I was quoted everything from €5000 to €1400. The cheapest offer was from a company in India that I thought might be worth going with. However, in the end I didn’t have the money to invest in a project that mightn’t make much money so I decided to try and build it myself. I did a bit of research and found a social network plugin for Joomla called community builder, it came highly recommended and the forum support seemed good so I decided to go ahead and give it a go. My thoughts at the time were best case scenario I build a successful social network and some money worst case scenario I learn something and lose time.

At first I thought community builder was a great solution. It took a little time for me to find its faults. Although it can look a little over whelming and it can be difficult to get your head around “what does what” with a little time and effort you can customize it to your needs. One piece of advice I would give anyone who is considering using Community builder is to read installation manual before installing the plugin. Normally all Joomla plugins work more or less the same way, community builder is different it requires a little more time. The different sections of the plugin need to be installed separately.

Once you have it up and running you can choose from numerous options such as what profile features you would like the user to have and to have forum integration and whether you want to allow users contact each other or not.

Some of the problems I had with community builder included how to configure it in such a way that a normal person could come online and contact one of the users. There were a number of paid upgrades that allowed this but I didn’t really want to go paying for it. In the end I found a plugin called publicmail. This works well, the only problem I have had is that there is not Captcha spam blocker. This again is available but costs money. Another plugin I would like to use is a google map integration plugin that would allow students to see how close each teacher is from their house. I haven’t had the chance to investigate this properly yet but will hopefully get around to it in the next few days.

Although community builder is a great open source plugin I found that a lot of the upgrades were expensive also Joomlapolis (the Community builder website and forum) only has restricted access for people who don’t pay. So I suppose you could say that it is open source to a certain extent. I suppose they have to make money somehow!!!

One of the most important features of the website was a section where students could place adverts looking for teachers. This was easy to find and configure. Joomla has the adsmanger plugin which works well. Although I have had very few problems with this plugin I have seen a number of people complaining that if you encounter a problem there is virtually no support. As the plugin is free the makers don’t feel they should spend their time answering questions. This is something I can definitely sympathise with.

The biggest challenge I have faced so far with this project is getting the look of the website right. Originally I felt as long as the information required was there people wouldn’t be too worried about how the site looked. I can’t express how wrong I was, for the first few weeks I was receiving quite a bit of traffic but had a bounce rate of 90%. This means that 90% of people who visited the site closed it straight away. Although I lost a lot of people who could have become members in that time I think I learned a valuable lesson. The aesthetics of a website matter a lot!!!! I changed the template and managed to learn enough about photoshop to change the header to something that reflected the website. Now it is by no means perfect but it is a lot better than what it was and my bounce rate has gone down to an average of a little over 40%.

I think it if I had my time over again I would use a different content management system and a different plugin. In my opinion wordpress usually produces better looking websites than Joomla. Maybe it’s due to my lack of experience but I often find that Joomla isn’t as easy to use or configure as wordpress. I think Joomla is just a little overly complicated and often there is no good documentation to go with the plugins. A lot of Joomla plugins require paid upgrades which aren’t much use to anyone who wants to build a website for free.

Wordpress has the buddypress which comes highly recommended. I think this combined with the range of themes and other plugins that wordpress has to offer could be a better solution.

So far my website has done okay; it gets quite a few visits and a few people have managed to find classes through it. I guess it’s still a work in progress. The website is called clases de ingles Madrid. If you are an English teacher in Madrid feel free to sign up. If you are a student of English in Madrid you can place advert looking for a teacher.

If you have any experience with either buddypress or Community builder please share below. If you have any questions or need any help with your own social network please feel free to ask.