When a social network is built someone will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Three years ago the company I work for began it’s first social network design. The customer we had done some web work with before. The customer was informed we had never designed a site of this complexity before. Our salesman at the time who was also a web programmer insisted that we could handle the job. The client agreed that even though this was new to us they wanted to move forward. So we began the development of our first social networking website. Did we start with a social networking software of any kind? NO! We began what turned out to be thousands of hours of coding and recoding and recoding. It became apparent real quick just how in trouble we had gotten. We were far beyond just taking a loss and we continued. The site was fraught with bugs so the losses continued, many man hours paid out to our programmers and no new payments coming in. The whole process was stressful for our team.
We considered never taking another social network design on. Luckily our team came to include some incredibly talented and ambitious programmers & front end designers. We decided to learn from our mistakes and build a customizable social networking software. This software would be a starting point for each custom design. We would have to be able to add or subtract features. Newly developed features would have to be easily integrated into the framework. So we began the development of the first version of the social networking software. Luckily this time we knew what we needed. The actual development took well over double the predicted time frame. When done we had a framework that was full of bugs. It wasn’t as efficient as it could be but it was fully functional. The bugs were all fixed and we began building custom social networks for clients.
We were still losing money on each network we developed. The framework wasn’t efficient enough. It took to long to set up and long time to add features to. Customization wasn’t as easy as it could be. Every custom change seemed to create two or three bugs. So what did we do? We began the second version of the framework. The second version was really awesome and we found it way easier to cater to the customers needs. Although the second version of the software made all the difference in the world we had learned so much the development of 2.5 began right away. All of this development and improvement had to be done between paying client projects. Here we are years later with version three. Every social network we design has a full custom appearance and layout. Some of the core functions are often similar and most include newly developed completely unique features. We couldn’t create these websites without a social network software that we could easily customize and add to. A social software with no bugs that is user tested and that can easily except changes and new features.
Do you need to hire a company that has a social software already developed? Yes. Does the quality of the social networking software matter? Yes. Beware of any company that says “we’re going to build the this social network from scratch” . Make sure you check the sites in the portfolio to ensure that they do in fact include social networking features. Ask about the software. Ask about limitations of the software.
Remember a fully custom social networking website is best integrated with a fully tested framework. Pearse Street Inc has emerged as the leader in social network design & social software development. Find out more about Pearse Street services by visiting http://www.pearsestreet.com/services.php .
