Best Community Website Builder Solutions
No matter what the original reason for joining a community site is, you as the host will have the opportunity to create content, encourage an audience that is loyal to you, and stimulate their interest in your product. However, before you build a community website, you should research the niche and make sure the platform you choose is the proper one for you, to figure it out, read our article carefully.
How to create a community website by Scrile Connect
No matter what the original reason for joining a community website is, you as the host will have the opportunity to create content, encourage an audience that is loyal to you, and stimulate their interest in your product. However, before you build a community website, you should research the niche and make sure the platform you choose is the proper one for you, to figure it out, read our article carefully.
By connecting people into communities, you become responsible for ensuring that members have access to specific information shared in your online community, Members are able to build private connections freely with each other and share data and experiences. A community website becomes the best example of an ideal digital platform for your audience to have easy access to all the data and the latest news all in one place.
No matter what is the original reason for joining an online community website, you as a dedicated host have the power to create new valuable content, improve the existing one, shared guides, regularly tell people your voice via podcast and encourage them to come back to your online community site again and again, and finally become members. Rich content stimulates interest in your product raising their loyalty. However, before you build a community website, you should explore the niche and make sure the platform you choose is the proper one for you, to select the best one, read our article carefully.
The Basics of a Community Website
Some of the components that usually feature community sites are discussions, polls, informational courses, galleries, blogs, push notifications, email newsletters, etc. The primary purpose of communities is to build well-developed communication and strengthen both the social and private relationships of community members united with common interests and experiences that they are willing to share with each other. So, usually, online communities unite hundreds of different social groups: sports fans, university students, lovers of movies, literature clubs, craftspeople, entrepreneurs, and so on. All such websites are aimed to form a safe and comfortable environment for people with common interests and willing to communicate with like-minded people.
Things to Consider Creating Your Own Community Website
First of all, when it comes to the moment to make your own online community website, you need to decide on the tool that you will use when developing the website. To make the right choice you need to understand your skills in coding, clearly imagine the final version of the website and how it will function. The number of functions you need from the software would define the pricing. If you do not have sufficient knowledge in coding, and you aren’t ready to undertake the development of the site, there are two options you have.
High Budget Options
If you have an unlimited budget for your community, you can hire a special human or even a whole team of people who will take on all responsibilities and risks for the building of the online community website. You’ll give them some guidelines and ideas of your perfect community, then wait for the result. Though you should understand that there is no highly qualified team that could fulfill a 100% picture from your head. By the way, you should understand that after releasing the website, the team will leave you, and you would manage it yourself. Consequently, you should know how it works from the very beginning.
Low Budget Options
You also have another option, you can choose software suitable for both beginners and people with experience. Such tools give you a chance to create an online social community by yourself. It is easy and requires zero coding experience, just a clear picture in your head, and you are ready to go. By the way, such platforms have a highly experienced support team that will help you on this way from the very beginning till your site exists.
Below we take a closer look at the software providers that currently offer the most modern tools. There is no universal software suitable for everyone, but we will try to identify the benefits of each of them and help you decide on the best choice.
6 Best services to create a community website
Scrile Connect
Scrile Connect is an innovative software that on the one hand easily allows a person who is new to the world of website design to make a unique social online community without knowing even a line of code, with a great customer friendly interface. On another, if you are a master of website building you would have access to the source code, so you could fulfill your ideas and almost build your site from scratch.
Our customers choose the following features as the main pros of Scrile Connect: great and helpful support team that guarantees help 24/7, trusted privacy protection, and exclusive hosting solutions. So, you shouldn’t be afraid of getting lost on the way to your perfect community. The support team stands for the comfort of our customers, the team gives answers to any problems you have. All your data is securely stored in compliance with GDPR and Privacy-Shield, which should make you sure that all the info like log in data (username, password), elements of private messages would never go outside your online community or become public in the future.
It doesn’t matter if you are an individual blogger or a fast-growing brand Scrile Connect would be useful for everyone. There are several effective plans for any client.
Scrile Connect Plans
| Scrile Connect Plans | ||
| Startup | $10 per month | Cloud website hosting 10 builder pages Testing billing account Admin panel 5 GB storage |
| Professional | $500 per month ($250/first month) | *All Startup features No limited builder pages 0% commission fee Unique domain name Unique site content policy Your own billing account 1000 GB storage |
| Enterprise | Flexible price (Contact the team) | *All Professional features Source code access Editable design Unlimited storage Premium support |
As we wrote it doesn’t matter if you are an expert or have never worked with website building, Scrile Connect has both an intuitive creator side and user side. That’s a perfect choice for those who don’t want to think too much about the tech aspect while building a website or a community. Scrile Connect is so smooth in the integration of customers and users, that you can feel free to try it right now and go ahead with your own online community. It is available worldwide (USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia, countries of Europe and Asia, etc)
Wix
Wix is one of the finest examples of all-in-one platforms. Wix is a versatile website builder for launching, navigating, administrating, and managing smooth community working. With Wix, you can integrate custom blogs, add forum categories and threads, activities, and events, to enrich your community site.
Wix offers you 2 options to build your own online community, website or landing. There are Wix ADI and Wix Standard Editor. Both technologies are designed for people with different goals. ADI is a good option for small projects like personalized portfolios, blogs, personal websites, etc. If you don’t have any experience in coding then ADI would perfectly work for you in automated mode.
Though if you want to create a super sound community website you should use the Editor tool. An online community is a way more complicated project than just a portfolio or a blog. The editor requires more knowledge in website design and coding. You as a host take control, not only over the hard community building process and making a brand-new website but also managing subscriptions, building a mobile app compatible with Apple or Android devices, integration of popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Wix Plans
There are several plans that help you to create a website with a subscription for your community.
| Wix Plans | Personal use | |
| Combo | $10,50 per month | 2 GB bandwidth 3 GB storage 30 minutes of video |
| Unlimited | $15 per month | Unlimited bandwidth 10GB storage 1 hour of video Visitor analytics |
| VIP | $29 per month | Unique logo support First priority support Unlimited bandwidth 35GB storage 5 hours of video |
| For brands | ||
| Business Basic | $20 per month | Online payments Unlimited bandwidth 20 GB storage 5 hours of video |
| Business Unlimited | $30 per month | Unlimited bandwidth 35 GB storage 10 hours of video *All Business Basic features |
| Business VIP | $49 per month | Unlimited bandwidth 50 GB storage Unlimited video *All Business Unlimited features |
With all these plans everyone can find a proper solution to fulfill their ideas and get access to the usage of a great variety of tools and templates you need for it. Actually, the only important issue with Wix that comes to us is if you want to create a high-quality community you have to choose a standard editor. As we wrote above it is probably a little complicated especially for new members or someone who is not ready to face with challenges of community building.
WordPress
WordPress is a free CMS platform. Using WordPress you can build various websites, for different groups of people. It might be simple personal blogs or even a fully fledged community with paid weekly subscriptions. WordPress was originally created for the distribution of content by bloggers who wanted to grow big and move from successful Facebook or Instagram boards to their own independent sites, where only they could set rules and take charge of subscriptions, interact with subscribers and get their direct feedback. However, as the program has quickly developed, so the types of content, available templates, and product formats made on WordPress have greatly changed and expanded.
Creating your virtual community on a WordPress basis, you need a minimum of default knowledge in website design. Working with WordPress, firstly, you should focus on dealing with hosting issues and study the process in detail. Secondly, you should know the strategy of choosing and obtaining a domain name that you like, but remember to check it to be available.
The only shady aspect of WordPress is a free CMS tool. Even though it is claimed to be free, you still have to invest some money if you want your online community to have the potential for social recognition. You also have to pay for plugins to make the community intuitive and informative for society. Though WordPress offers some paid solutions that you can choose.
WordPress Plans
| WordPress Paid Plans | ||
| Personal | $12 per month | Free Domain for One Year Best-in-class hosting Remove WordPress.com Ads Unlimited Email Support Forum & community support |
| Premium | $26 per month | Free Domain for One Year Live Chat Support Premium themes Forum & community support Google analytics integration |
| Business | $83 per month | 50,000 WordPress plugins SEO tools Forum & community support Automated community backups SFTP and Database Access |
| eCommerce | $149 per month | Accept payments from 60+ countries Top Shipping Carriers Integrations Premium design options for online stores Forum & community support |
WordPress is undoubtedly a world-famous giant in website building. This software would be suitable for you if you are interested in creating a high-quality online community, but do not forget that even the most popular tool can have its pitfalls, in this case, it is the need to deal with hosting and domains yourself.
Ning
Ning is an example of an absolutely thriving solution for website building, based on this platform you can run relevant full-fledged game sites, social networks, and social communities. Ning is a truly well-developed resource suitable for new members as well as passionate content creators with experience in web design.
The main advantage of Ning is the intuitive drag and drop editor. This type of editor allows you to customize content resources without any line of code. With this type of editing tool, it is pretty easy to set the image and content of the website step by step. Ning also allows you to simultaneously work through the different content components displayed on the website of your community independently of each other, the management of the content is also very intuitive.
Though it is so easy to manipulate the community, advice from our team is to think wisely before buying a plan. As we wrote above Ning can be used for different kinds of goals. So there might be some functions that would be of no use for your online community. You would pay for a section where followers can ask and answer questions, extra messaging service, media library, any functions similar to stories, or Facebook alike key features, and there would be no option to enable or disable it up to your taste. Ning developers don’t offer a free plan, but you still can try a 14-trial period to get familiar with the platform and choose the plan that is likely to fit your ideas.
Ning Plans
| Ning Plans | ||
| Basic | $25 per month | Maximum of 1000 users 10 GB storage available Forums & communities Support respond within 24 hours Drag & Drop editor SEO tools |
| Performance | $49 per month | Maximum of 10 000 users 50 GB of storage available Forums & communities Support respond within 24 hours 15 RSS feeds on the homepage *All basic plan features |
| Ultimate | $99 per month | Maximum of 100 000 users 100 GB of storage available Forums & communities Live chat Personal manager 24/7 support for calls Support respond within 12 hours 25 RSS feeds on the homepage |
Ning is the perfect solution for starting a social network or gaming platform, but if you are only interested in social communities it is on par with the rest of the platforms mentioned in this article.
Elgg
Elgg is an ideal solution for those who are interested in social networking. It can be a good solution for schools and enterprise collaborations. The main advantage of Elgg is that offering an open-source solution for the organization of your community site or group, it allows customers to hold all the tools in their hands.
Elgg can be defined as a framework that helps to manipulate the content in any way possible. You as a community host can track subscription packages, and schedule the development of the online community in general. You choose plugins and templates built into the community. As well as the plugins, you choose for customizable user profiles and access levels.
One of the cons of Elgg is that there is no demo version of the platform. But Elgg founders offer a completely free version, which allows you to get acquainted with the functionality of tools, so you could make up your own review related only to your own experience. But the official website of the platform does not provide any list or information about the cost of using Elgg. So if you’re interested in the cost, it’s better to reach the representatives of the product directly.
phpFox
phpFox is another platform that allows you to build your unique social networks and communities. You can make communities by uniting people into communities upon their interests and procreating groups of unities of brands and sports fans.
Using this platform you have a lot of features that will make your online community complex, modern and informative. Moreover, the main feature of phpFox is the special attention to the security of your data and the control of popup ads presence in the community.
phpFox brings the selection of several plans for a single license.
| phpFox plans | ||
| Lite | $299 | Media integration Pages, Groups, Events Community Support Only Free 12-month Software Updates |
| Pro | $539 | Engagement statistics Monetization Reactions 60-day Ticket Support *All Lite features |
| Ultimate | $1599 | White-label Mobile App iOS & Android support Free 3 Mobile Builds *All Pro features |
phpFox is said to allow you to run any type of website, regardless of whether it is a social network or online community.
Summary
At the very end of our article, we want to state that the market for website and community builders might be huge, but the real success of your product would depend a lot on its quality. Remember to create a high-tech multi-featured community and a product that would help you to increase the audience with its simplicity and quality. On the one hand, there are platforms designed to create gaming and blogging websites and as a bonus, they help with community building, on the other hand, we have platforms designed for communities, such platforms would offer you no useless features or overpriced plans. Choosing an ideal platform isn’t a one-minute decision, and we hope that our article helped you even a little bit. Enjoy the exploring process and if you don’t know where to start, Scrile Connect startup plan might seem a good option.
