Upgrading from Ning (1st post noob)

[outwest]

This post seemed to fit best in Requests, but I do not have permission to start a new thread there yet.
I am part of an online community that currently uses Ning. We have begun talks of creating a new site from the ground up. Our needs consist of everything Ning currently offers, but with a new custom presentation. Ideas currently are an interactive splash page, scrolling movement within pages and completely custom graphic button tabs to navigate the site.
We have graphic designers in our group. We may or may not have the skills to lay this out ourselves- i certainly don't. Good thing is time is on our side. We are in no rush to get this developed and are willing to learn trial by fire. If any of you have experience relocating a Ning community I would love to hear about it.

So now the questions. What exactly do I/we need to learn to accomplish this ourselves?
If the group were to decide to hire someone for this project about what would that cost?
Many thanks, Jeff

 

[CaldwellYSR]

This post seemed to fit best in Requests, but I do not have permission to start a new thread there yet.
I am part of an online community that currently uses Ning. We have begun talks of creating a new site from the ground up. Our needs consist of everything Ning currently offers, but with a new custom presentation. Ideas currently are an interactive splash page, scrolling movement within pages and completely custom graphic button tabs to navigate the site.
We have graphic designers in our group. We may or may not have the skills to lay this out ourselves- i certainly don't. Good thing is time is on our side. We are in no rush to get this developed and are willing to learn trial by fire. If any of you have experience relocating a Ning community I would love to hear about it.

So now the questions. What exactly do I/we need to learn to accomplish this ourselves?
If the group were to decide to hire someone for this project about what would that cost?
Many thanks, Jeff

I would suggest avoiding the "interactive splash page" you were talking about. Splash pages seem to suggest a Flash site and to be honest if I see a splash screen when I'm browsing I leave before it loads. Flash shouldn't be used in web design.

Now I don't know alot about Ning but in my recent search for different Social Networking platforms I came across Elgg which looked like it would work pretty well. It's pretty popular right now. There's also Pligg but that has some weird thing where users vote for or against different posts. If you're going to build a social networking site from the ground up it's going to take ALOT of server side scripting. Something like PHP or Rails. Your best bet is going to be to try to work with a platform. If you're already comfortable and happy with Ning then I'm sure it has functionality for new templates or themes to change the aesthetic parts of the site while keeping the same back-end functionality and not requiring you to learn a completely new system. I would suggest going this route and sticking with what you know.

 

[outwest]

Thanks for your take, Caldwell.
Not sure I completely agree with your Flash statement. One thing I didn't include in the OP is that we are a gaming group. Having some Flash capabilities might make more sense for us then most. Perhaps having it on a splash page isn't the best design though. Had not thought about that.

 

[CaldwellYSR]

Thanks for your take, Caldwell.
Not sure I completely agree with your Flash statement. One thing I didn't include in the OP is that we are a gaming group. Having some Flash capabilities might make more sense for us then most. Perhaps having it on a splash page isn't the best design though. Had not thought about that.

If you have flash games one your site that's fine. I was referring to using flash as part of the design. That's wrong. There are much better tools for designing interactive web sites and there's nothing you'll need to do with flash that can't be done with a better tool. With the obvious exception of flash games on the site. A splash screen is a big nono, any kind of "awesome" hover effects can be done much easier (and faster) with Jquery or even CSS3. Flash is a wonderful tool and it revolutionized the web in many places and it has it's places. However web "design" is not one of it's places. It's too big and powerful for anything you'll want to do with the design of the page.