I’m sort of a newbie to blogging and i want to create a music sharing site like soundcloud my.nojustok.com and reverbnation.com with these features but don’t know how to go about it;
The site will be like a social media website(with likes, comment, ratings etc), but for musicians and music fanatics. Something like soundcloud.com
the site will also have a forum with different categories like rap, gospel, jazz etc
the site will also be operated like a music download site e.g tooxclusive.com
and other exciting features
This site i intend to build will require lots of uploads and downloads so basically storage, responsiveness, uptime, fastness and moderation(since it’s sort of like a social network) will be very important.
Like i said initially, i’m sort of a newbie. This site i want to create I know it will be sensitive to copyright issues and other matters, but I no nothing about that, or how to prevent or tackle any. All I know is I want to build a website!
Please guys! If you know how i’m to go about this my intended website, and how to be in alignment with law, suitable hosting, site protection, speed e.t.c please help me. Thank you and God bless
Someone will build it, but I need to know about what i’m paying for and what is suitable. I’ve met two site builders, but they both just want me to pay and then they build with the “knowledge they have”. Why I said the “knowledge they have” is because recently, I met a web builder and he promised to build a beautiful site. He told me to use whogohost as my web host, but after some research I learnt that a shared host would not be suitable for what I intend to build because of it’s sensitivity, that a cloud computing Service would be best. You see? I don’t just want a beautiful site, but very functional and secured as well. That is why I am here to seek the advice of very knowledgeable and techy people.
A developer suggesting to you to go with shared host does not mean he is not good enough.
He just might be working with the budget you have. Be prepared to pay big if you want big.
We never had the chance to even discuss the price. Found out that was all he knew. He thought I was going for the regular news and gossip blog. Just write and post.
Okay while this thread has made me giggle a bit, let me try and be helpful…
I think before you go further, you need to look at all the “exciting features” and determine what the unique selling point or “the thing”, majority of potential users will come to the site for - to listen to music? or chat on a jazz forum?. There is a reason soundcloud doesn’t do what reverbnation does, and reverbnation does not do what tooxclusive does.
But ask yourself does anyone really want or need a mix of all these services into one site or above? Infact who has actually said to you, I think this is a good idea?
After doing the above, my suggestion is to go into a prototyping phase…To save money, pencil and paper is your best bet or get a designer to help you out. This will allow you to think aloud through your product and realise what does not make sense… The aim is not to make it pixel perfect but to flesh out your idea. From here you might be able to create a better set of requirements and logic for your app/idea.
At this point a “web builder” should have a better understanding of what you aim to develop and could deliver the project per functionality set, or as a whole, taking into account any financial constraints you might have.
@klingz If I was you, before I spend one naira on hired developer help, I would first setup a free WordPress.com blog. Then graduate to a self-hosted WordPress install on a cheap shared host like Whogohost or Gigalayer. Then I’d experiment with modifying a premium WordPress theme from Themeforest. If you do this, you will learn so much from the experience that your questions will be different. At the very least, you will not feel nearly as helpless or blind. Cheers.
I’m most concerned about the copyright aspect. I know Nigerians are kinda lazy about this and more likely to give their songs to music sites for promo, but if you’re planning to upload foreign music your site might not last a month.
I’m not sure what you’re overall goal is, but what you’re talking about reminds me a bit of http://www.hotnewhiphop.com/ I’d suggest looking around (if I’m correct, this was built using Drupal). They’re primarily a news site, but they have a decent way of presenting new music. They tend to only put up Soundcloud hosted versions of songs though to avoid DMCA takedowns. They also have artist pages too, e.g http://www.hotnewhiphop.com/Drake/profile/
This is a major undertaking, what’s your research like? Doesn’t sound very good content/user-wise. You know enough to say ‘I can’t use shared hosting for this’, but a simple Google search will give you all the info you need to know about dealing with copyrights and other people’s works.
BUT! If you have done your research and this is something you’ve decided to do, you basically just need to keep looking for a good dev. You need to be prepared to pay a lot for it too. Not just the manpower but things like cloud hosting (like DigitalOcean) and storage for those heavy files (like Amazon S3), CDNs to speed up your site (like Cloudflare), and decently spec’d servers (good RAM, CPU processing etc). For the actual site, I wouldn’t recommend things Wordpress or Drupal. You could make it work but I would be wary of someone that recommended that to me off the bat. If you’re thinking about site moderation, you’re going to need more hands. An editor (or 3) or someone like that that would help you watch over the users because let’s face it, self/automated moderation is almost always 10% useful. Honestly, this feels like a huge undertaking for one person. Try and find a technical co-founder. The functionality will not be done and shipped in 3 months. You might need someone to help with that on a semi-permanent basis.
I would recommend starting off in bits and pieces. Save yourself some time and money and have something up that people can use, that you can also use as a proof-of-concept. For instance, you can start with just news. Or, music/musician pages with ratings. As time goes on and you get more help and users, you can add more modules like comments, forums etc.
