New Study: Revolve Nation

Introducing a new case study for the development of a social community website for a popular Boston-based entrepreneur networking group.

It’s been over a year since Exemplar Companies has contemplated moving its popular Boston Entrepreneur Networking group off of Meetup.com and onto its own platform. Consequently, the timing of this decision to move off of Meetup.com coincided with Exemplar’s recent debut of their non-profit organization, Revolve Nation; so there is a branding goal component that nudged the intent into execution.

Given the enormous complexity driving the Meetup.com platform, I knew that building better online/offline social community hybrid would be a daunting task. Fortunately, I have the flexibility to build out the community in an iterative fashion using open source technologies, which could be expanded and tested with a fraction of the existing member base of the Entrepreneur Networking group – which is exceeding 1,800 members to date.

While this post (and future related posts) cannot go into every detail of the project, I will be able to touch on some of the methods employed and examples of the work that will help give viewers an intimate look at building a complex social community website.

This approach, what I gather as a real-time case study, will help provide readers and understanding of how and why it is important to consider methodologies like, web strategy, information architecture, user interface design and usability. The case study, however, will not get into the nuts and bolts of the web development as this discipline is well understood and quantifiable by my intended audience.

Good question? Who should be reading this: IT folks, Web programmers, Web entrepreneurs, Marketing professionals or anybody that is interested in learning more about a work-in-progress with the strategy and design components of a social community website.

I will be as transparent as possible in my findings, but to be fair, most of these posts need to be cleared with Exemplar Companies so that any proprietary information or intellectual property is protected.