Luckily there’s a whole range of free software around to help you put together your ideal site. Before you begin, it’s worth spending some time drawing up a blueprint about what you’re hoping to achieve. It doesn’t matter if you’re a business, a sole trader or even an individual wanting to share information – it’s worth sketching out what you hope to achieve.

It’s also important to think about where you’re hoping to take the site if it becomes successful. Would you be wanting to add further features or will it always remain the same? All these things are worth bearing in mind, as once you start down a particular path it can be tricky to change course.

WordPress

Possibly the most popular blogging software available, WordPress is the package of choice for a large chunk of writers with an audience. It’s ideal for all corners, from individuals through to large corporations. It has a large library of plugins available to extend it’s capabilities. It’s also possible to completely customise the look and feel, allowing you to tie it in with that business brand or your individual style.

WordPress is great for anyone producing regularly updated content, as well as being able to handle static pages for information that doesn’t change. A common use is to have business announcements on a front page together with static product, company info and contact page. The great thing is that the structure is flexible and easy to manage, allowing content to be added and manipulated easily.

The community aspect comes in to play by allowing your readers to comment on articles and pages, providing feedback and sharing their views with both you and others. There are a range of moderation options available, from an “anything goes” approach through to being able to approve all comments prior to publication.

There are some things that you can pay for with WordPress. Some plugins charge extra for premium versions, while others are free but will accept minor donations to the author. You can also get help developing a theme or style for your WordPress installation, giving it a unique look and feel. Most web designers should be able to work with WordPress.

phpBB

A long running forum software, phpBB is fantastic for building online communities, particularly for common interest groups and niche discussion topics. It tends to work very well where there’s already a critical mass of community that already exists, such as a hobby group that already knows eachother. It’s also great for providing a team of people that chats regularly on Twitter somewhere more permanent to share thoughts and ideas.

As a forum phpBB can be themed to suit your own style in the same way as WordPress, as well as supporting a range of modifications that extend functionality. Mods aren’t as easy to manage as with WordPress, but work just as tightly.

Forums have a downfall in that they require a large amount of activity to become self-sustaining, usually from a core of users. If you don’t have a community that can sustain this, you may want to consider alternatives. A forum that isn’t regularly visited or updated can quickly become a ghost town instead of a vibrant nexus.

Mediawiki

If you’ve ever used Wikipedia, you’ve used Mediawiki. The software that powers one of the world’s top ten websites is available free for your own use. It’s fantastic for acting as a repository for images and documents, as well as being a great collaboration tool for articles and pages. If you’re looking at having a team of people work on a  central resource that would make a great reference, this might be something to look at.

Like the others, Mediawiki can be styled to suit your needs. That said, it isn’t the easiest thing to do and may present a challenge to any web designer you might be looking to hire. It also has a number of idiosyncrasies that need to be learned before you can really get the hang of using it, as well as needing a number of extensions before becoming useful. If you’ve got the time to learn it properly, it can be a useful tool.

A Hodgepodge Approach

You might be reading this and thinking that you’d like a bit of blog, a bit of forum and a bit of wiki. That’s an understandable approach – it’s rare that once size fits all. If you fall in to this camp, there’s a couple of approaches that you can take.

The first is to pick your core area (like a blog) and then look for ways to extend it out to provide the features you need. This might be through the use of plugins, or through the use of bridging software between two distinct software packages. Bridging software typically allows things like single sign-on, shared databases and so on.

The second approach is to use an integrated content management system such as Drupal or Joomla. Both of these work on a framework of modules that can be bolted together to give your site the structure and layout that you want. There are modules for blogs, forums wikis and many more besides.

The main drawback with this is the “jack of all trades” approach. While your site will feel tightly integrated and focused, you’ll also find that it lacks features that can be found in packages focused on a single role. If your aim is to provide a range of services for your users, a CMS might be the perfect choice. If not, you might prefer to focus on your key area first.

Going Full Circle

Remember, being aware of the social web is all about keeping in touch with people in ways that suits them. Don’t pour all your effort into your website, only to ignore your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Keep things balanced, but make sure you keep fresh and active on all fronts.

Another area to note is in tying things together. Mention new posts or topics of interest on Twitter. By reverse, remind your readers to follow your account on Twitter, or to take a look at your Facebook page. This way you’re not treating each group as an isolated bunch, but are instead encouraging them to mingle with eachother. Think of it as one grand cocktail party instead of three separate buffets.

So how should it be done? Research into crowdsourcing techniques indicates that it works best when you have a large number of people, preferably removed from the immediate problem, who then submit ideas on how to solve it. Others can then comment on those ideas and provide feedback, while even the most meagre of participants can give an idea a simple thumbs up/down to help rank and sort ideas. A great example of this is WebStorm, which is ideal for collecting a large number of ideas on a general topic and allowing them to be weighted by participants. Another possibility is InnoCentive, which also specialises in capturing ideas and helping organisations work out solutions to their problems. The important thing is that there are common web themes and platforms out there that really demonstrate with a little research how to do this kind of work, yet falling back on a Wiki seems somewhat clumsy.

What the Wikimedia Foundation desperately needs are cohesive strategies that tackle the bigger issues they face in a unified way, not in a fragmented and piecemeal approach. It needs to engage with it’s readership more meaningfully and not just relying on page impressions or Alexa rankings as an indication of how they are performing. The foundation’s biggest asset is that it faces very little competition, while it’s biggest weakness remains what would happen if someone else produced something that was easier to use and easier to participate in. This is critical – all Wikipedia content is licensed as freely available under a Creative Commons agreement, making it quite trivial for someone to assemble a better framework purely in order to pull in editors and lure others away from Wikimedia projects. The feedback gained from the silent readership could be something as trivial as “Was this article helpful to you? Yes/No” – you know, the kind of thing Amazon has been doing for years for weighting reviews and which Facebook use successfully for calculating advert popularity. It could be something as complex as promoting the use of talk pages, or organising the global Wikimedia Chapters to go out and engage the public. Hold focus groups, ask members of the public to participate, that kind of thing. Without this external view to help shape and mold an organisation’s perception of itself, it just becomes an internal feedback loop that reinforces already held beliefs.

So what should the Wikimedia Foundation be doing? Over the next few posts, I’ll be looking at one aspect of the service and describing how things could be improved. None of it will be rocket science and none of it will be demanding the impossible, but all of it should be focusing on making the experience better for the readers and editors alike. If you think something’s worthwhile, feel free to shout out in the comments.