Community Based Website Question

[riverbirch]

Hi,

I just bought a domain and want to create an artist community where members can post their own work in their own galleries. Any suggestions on way to build such a site. I'm looking for something which would be easy for visitors to use. I know of Joomla, Drupal and Coppermine Photo Gallery.

Thanks in advance,
Tim

[Web Res]

I've also been looking at options to build a sharing point for people to post ideas and then use them for reference. I've been looking at wiki's thinking that if there are multiple authors with some monitoring systems and built in things like RSS; then the community could grow more organically and take some of the pressure off a central management. And yet still yield an interesting and growing website.

It would seem that many wikis have these features. They are similar to bulletin boards, but they also have more of a website like presentation. Problem is do you allow an artist to change another artist's page? But, for the things where people discuss techniques or features of an art scene in specific areas or genres the wiki could be cool.

In your case, there are many websites that do something similar with accommodations. They have a sign up process where you can create your own page and then manage it - no one else can make any changes. I don't think they are as easy to set up. I use Joomla for a private site for a motel group. I like it. But, we don't give authoring rights to anyone. Perhaps we could, but we need to maintain a professional presentation. We are looking at adding 'user-reviews' which would allow visitors to comment on specific properties.

I would look at wikis. They have out of the box features for users to create accounts and ways to rollback spam and bad posts. Some how I think these styles of websites will become more comon and users will become more acustom to adding and changing a website. Perhaps today users are not ready for that, but they will be.

[rellis]

Have you looked at SquareSpace yet? If you'll have less than 250 members, it certainly worth considering. It gets a lot of kudos for ease of use. I'm just setting up my site, so I can't give you any more insight than the sales material would, but here's a link -- they offer a 30-day trial.

Build a Website - Create a Blog - Squarespace

[datetopia]

What type of content is the creative community based on? Graphics, design, photography, videos, music, poetry, articles?
This is important for choosing the platform. Some members might want to post vector graphics or flash animations. Your website should support this.