Customer Reviews

Design for Community

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Heard this lately from your boss? "Hey, let's add some community to our site. Our traffic will explode!" or "Let's make a blog, how hard can it be?" The Web is by its very nature interactive, so one-way broadcasts are out, communities are in. Community add-ons and sites are all the rage, but how do you do it right? Derek Powazek's book shows you how.

This book is not a technology book on the intricacies of blogger or Manila. The focus is on the design and moderation issues that arise when you add community features to your site. You'll learn what works and what doesn't when building and running virtual communities on the Web.

The author should know. Derek Powazek, a journalist by training, has helped build many pioneering virtual communities for HotWired, Electric Minds, Vivid Studios, Netscape, and his own fray.com and kvetch.com (love that site). He writes with wit and wisdom on what works on the Web when creating and running thriving online communities.

Each chapter focuses on a specific issue of community building on the Web, from moderation to intimacy to using email. Each chapter ends with New Riders' signature interview with an expert in that particular area. They include:

Matt Haughey (metafilter.com), Steven Johnson (plastic.com), Rob Malda (slashdot.org), John Styn (CitizenX.com), Matt Williams (Amazon.com), and Howard Rheingold (rheingold.com).

One of the things I learned is that in some cases it's a good idea to "bury the post button." By making users read through your entire article, and *then* supplying the "post your response" button at the end, you automatically filter out all but the most interested readers. Your discussions will stay on topic and have higher signal-to-noise ratios.

Powazek says: "Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, form intimate relationships over time." He goes so far as to say that sites without community-related features are doomed. "Any Internet technology that does not allow for its users to communicate directly with each other is doomed to failure."

After reading this book, you'll feel like you've designed a community already, and your next one will be better for it. Recommended. From WebReference.com.

I'm in the process of retooling an online community myself, and Design for Community has given me a lot to think about. It's extremely useful. No one should try to build an online community without reading this book first.

While it is not difficult to find the software tools required to build an online community, experience and insight is harder to come by. Powazek draws examples from his own work and interviews some of the leading lights of online communities to show what has worked, what doesn't, and what you should look out for.

This book invites its readers to ask themselves some questions about the online communities they want to build. Why do you want to build it? What are you trying to accomplish? What relationship do you want to have with your visitors? And how do you plan to keep order, maintain decorum, and enforce the community's rules? These are questions, I'm afraid, that many webmasters and site owners have simply never asked themselves, and boy does it ever show.

Case in point: In my very, very small corner of the web, just about everybody with a small home-based business and a two-bit web site wants to set up a mailing list or discussion board to go along with it. They don't appear to have done much thinking about it, apart from a vague notion that a forum would be cool and would draw traffic to their site. In fact, the biggest site/portal in the subculture I inhabit sells itself by saying that its discussion forums draw traffic to the hobbyist/small-business home pages it hosts and the advertising it sells -- i.e., its forums are its content. Meanwhile, the quality and tone of discussion on those forums is a constant source of grief. These people need to read this book.

Amidst all the ruble concerning the Internet as a destroyer of lives and just another pointless addiction, there is one jewel concerning its' role in bringing people together. Amidst all the senseless conversations and other garbage of people whose lives seem to be pointless, groups are getting together to share experiences, both of sorrows and joy. Some of the most interesting sites that have appeared are those that are formed around a bond of shared experiences. They are commonly referred to as community sites, where people hang out to find support and solace and the most effective ways to start and maintain such sites is the topic of this book.
Such sites are needed, but tend to burn out the moderators very quickly. The sites tend to provide a degree of anonymity that some people need if they are to expose their emotions to others. With so many challenges to overcome, it is clear that most people who create them do so out of a personal passion or commitment rather than a desire for glory. When reading this book, I found myself emotionally moved, a rare experience for one who reads computing books as a profession. The tales of woe and joy are simultaneously uplifting and depressing.
All emotions aside, this is the book you must read if you are considering the creation of a site designed to allow people to hang out and talk. By reading the related experiences of others, you will learn the best ways to develop such sites. They certainly are needed, as the breakdown of physical communities has led many to search out an alternate in the cyber realm. People still need people, whether they be physically or virtually nearby.

My review of this book is simple - it tells you everything you need to know to build and run an online community, in plain language, without irrelevent academic theories.

If you only buy one book, buy this one.

I have been involved with online communities for a while, and because I have been unhappy with their limited functionality, have been creating next generation software for them.

As a moderator for a 2,000+ community of swing dance enthusiasts (yehoodi.com), I was interested in Powazek's recommendations related to design and community-building online. I found some of the content a bit pedantic and simplistic, but I think this book would be an excellent introduction to someone thinking about starting an online-community.

This book tells you what it takes to run a virtual community - any kind. It is written in plain English, and it had been extremely fun to read. I highly recommend it to non-technical readers such as Web project managers, Webmasters and Web designers. Everybody will be able to learn a great deal from this book, regardless of their backgrounds.
You will find yourself feeling much more knowledgeable - if not confident - after reading this book.

I've read most of the recent books in this field, several of them quite good. But this is the first one to really tell it like it is in an easy, informal style that gives you feel of being there. No theory. This is how it really is, folks. Organized, comprehensive, factual. Tells you WHAT to expect and WHY. Some HOW but no techy code. Just useful links to all the detail you probably don't want to know -- yet. The interviews with leaders on each topic is a unique feature bringng it all down to earth.

This is a great book. If you ever have a hand in developing a site with a strong sense of community, the real world insight Powazek has gathered here is indispensable. One of the best aspects of the book are the many interviews with designers who are out there doing these types of sites. I found it interesting that full-blown "anyone can post anything" models often work against creating community, whereas, stronger editorial policies and higher levels of entry for participation went a long way to fostering it.

This book is about virtual communities. Although the title specifies Design, there is alot more in the book than just the Design aspect. The author covers alot of ground, in that everything related to virtual community is covered.
One aspect covered is the relationship between content and community. The author points out that the two are interlinked in that interesting content leads naturally to conversation. Therefore, content (such as a story) should have a direct link next to it to community discussion. Most sites fail to do this properly.
Another aspect covered very well is the relationship between commerce and community. In fact the author breaks new ground because for the first time in a virtual community book, the interrelationship of community and commerce is mentioned and in fact a whole chapter is devoted to it. The author even quotes research from participate.com on the relationship between commerce and community.
The reason why this book is so interesting is because there are many real life examples and alot of experiences the author mentions he has encountered from his work building virtual communities. However, the best part of this book are the interviews with other experienced virtual commuity builders from such companies as Amazon. These interviews are at the end of each chapter are quite long and detailed. This makes the book very interesting to read at times. I really enjoyed the interview with the Amazon Director of community.

I have been managing an online community of about 6,000 users since 2004. Prior to that, my experience was one with Web Design and Project Management. Little did I know what was ahead for me. The challenges that I ran into were many and I was fortunate to count with the help of some great users of the community who volunteered their help and expertise to help us steer through them.

If I had taken the time to research and ran into "Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places", prior to the design and launch of the community, I would have definitely implemented many of the pieces of advice it offers. I started reading this book only a week ago, and within hours of grabbing it, I was finding things I could apply to our community to address some of the pending issues that needed to be solved.

This is one of those books I won't stop recommending to anyone with the task of designing a site to host an online community, and then those tasked with managing it. Its advice, though a bit dated in some places, is priceless and timeless for the most part.