How do I program my social network?

[Ssammoh]

I designed my own social network called Friend Cake, but all I did was just draw it out on paint.net. I know how I want it too look, all the features, and stuff like that. Now what do I do?

[Vomit]

Either take a long time to learn web design or pay through the nose for a web designer to build it. You can't just turn a drawing into a website overnight.

[Cyberoptik Depatch]

Oh you can build social network without knowing anything about web designing..all you need is some common sense.Now there are a lot of CMS's {content management systems} out there free.if you know what ur final output should look like,you can get a list of these cms's and check which one luks closer to ur idea.i mean the appearance and functions. then you can change the cms to ur friend cake! and handling a cms is very easy.its as easy as handling fb.

Joomla is a perfect CMS on which u can make almost ANYTHING! even yahoo answers itself! or else, if ur site wants to look like fb, you can use Jcow.but i think they don't give Jcow at the moment for free, but u can find a download from somewhere.or u have two other great options, they are boonex dolphin and drupal. there are templates and plugins all around the web for these cms'z you can probably find a template that is most similar to ur site and then add plugins like a chat bar etc.

well u can do all deze stuff for free if u use ur brain a bit.start this way, if u like.I can help on the go.

u can get connected to mynetwork on yahoo answers and i can try to help u.

[Jim]

security is a HUGE issue. you will also eventually need a data center when it grows big enough. if it grows, you will experience growing pains, like being forced to .

you will probably need to have targeted ads on your site and some sort of developer's SDK or plugin system if you want people to develop apps for it, but if you do, you will also need to spend the time approving those apps by doing some sort of "safety" code review of the plugin in question, which is tedious (facebook-like? up to you). having integrity will keep you out of trouble.

it should be intuitive to use, meaning, you should be able to take your mom and set her down and her be able to use your social network program without her having to ask a lot of questions. keep it simple. if it can have nice features, yahoo - make the features simple to use and easy to get to.

if you have a lot of stuff, breadcrumb menus are great for heirarchies of stuff, they can hide a lot of complexity - I had a tree menu on my 700-page site and the pages took up 104k each of HTML, 99% was for navigation for every page... so I heard about breadcrumb menus, and I remembered seeing them on dmoz.org, and one was implemented in O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook, so I redesigned my menu system around that and now my pages are 14k-50k each.

people have gotten to the point where they don't like downtime. they expect 24x7.

if you are just wireframing the pages, use adobe fireworks. adobe products work fairly well together. I suggest you get adobe master collection for $2600, because you are going to be doing video, audio, working with html, javascript, server-side scripting such as Perl or Groovy, SQL, and JQuery/YUI/fillintheblank.

a web design degree/certificate helps, even better if you are self-taught. good coding skills, graphic design skills, art skills, and a good eye for visuals help a lot. without those your site won't look good.

this is what he meant by getting a web designer. oh, and then there's any use of the now-fading Flash or the new Adobe Edge for menus or animation.

coding for mobile phones is another matter. see 2nd link. you have to take into account the small screen sizes, 640x1100 or 1100x640 are approximately the resolution. you can get cell phone emulators. I am not sure if adobe's device central does this for web pages. nope. you may have to get one from the mfr's web site where you can download an sdk, which requires a business, business .com email address and possibly web site address, may cost you a couple of hundred dollars. also cost you support subscription fees but only if you want to make a phone app.

eventually you may get to a point where you get enough visits that

preventing people from uploading 700MB 300dpi full-page scanned and other generally large files (and checking the file extension) is critical because some people don't know any better (to them it's a picture and they don't know how to put a picture in a computer) it will save your precious bandwidth. if you can cancel that before it even comes down the wire, do, like putting in some sort of filesize limit such as 2MB.

just tried to build a site with the latest version of joomla - it's broken. maybe later. problem is, you have to learn how to customize it, and that also takes time. either way, you have a steep learning curve. with joomla, you have to deal with someone else's code, and you have to use someone else's templates... what you choose is up to you.