help from Admin staff

[firestorm]

I had created a site a while back ago, and I had some questions to pick your brains to get a jump start.

to give you guys some information about it first. it's basically a small social networking site for both my church's youthgroup and anyone who would like to be in a great christian networking site. It's going to be more geared toward reaching out and ministry and encouraging people to go and minister to others.

If you guys want to see the web site it's in the link section called under "testers needed"


Now what I wanted to know from you guys is. You guys have quite a successful site you have here. and I just wanted to know.

At the beginning. What did you guys do to get people to keep on coming back? I mean I know that there are your people that join and never come back again, but you guys have a really good number of people who are dedicated users for you guys so how do you do it?

Also I don't know if you guys did any advertising for the site but if you guys did, any tips on advertising for it?

Also where did you guys learn the html codes or whatever coding you use it get your site to look like this? now I know what your thinking "Hey man that looks great what are you talking about?" Well the look of the site is it's not really my creation; it's a template given by the site. I want to make it really unique and something of it's own. Any place You guys suggest to learn the coding?

Also any general tips on heading and leading a site would be great. I really need help with this. ^-^ anyways thank you guys and God bless.

[Mithrandir]

It's very hard to claim any one thing is responsible for a "successful" site. This site serves a very specific need, it's easy to find on Google, the service is (typically, anyway) reliable, and the general feel of the board tends to be friendly and courteous. These, I think, are the most important things to focus on. Find your target market, and figure out what they want.

That being said, most of the original staff are no longer around. The ones who are, typically visit the site on a weekly or even monthly run. I will defer to those individuals to answer your "startup" questions, as I was not around when the site was first created.

As for the code to the site, we started out as a simple web group, but the current site is a fairly heavily hacked version of vBulletin's web forum software. That's all PHP and MySQL on the back end, which builds an HTML/CSS/JS front-end for users' browsers. The chat is an AJAX front-end to a compatible PHP/MySQL back-end.

I can't tell you how to best learn to code, but I got a computer science degree, spent 10 years in the field, and then got a masters. Each aspect of my education lends itself to a different part of the site, and much of the evolution of the code mimic's both my own growth and the upgrades to the vBulletin code base.

I hope this is helpful to you.

- Mith