I have to say, I’m a big fan of WordPress.  Primarily because they don’t pigeon hole you into a site with ads (at least the self hosted version).  As I noted through a previous blog post, I was even able to make a very solid membership site with Wordpress, where each member:

  1. could write posts
  2. had member profile page
  3. could create private pages
  4. be identified in the “list of members”

It took me a good month to find all the right plugins for wordpress to make it humm just like I wanted it to.  I was so confident in the setup, I offered to create a site for a friend of mine for her group.  Oh how the cocky fall hard!

Two days after my offer, she writes me a note saying, “Don’t worry Jim, I have it all figured out.”  Now I know she couldn’t pull the WordPress stuff together that quickly!  She also wrote in her note, “Check out Ning.com”

There you go.  This company Ning is to Social Networking what WordPress is to Blogs/Websites (almost).  Now they do have advertising on the site, and you have to live with the “ning” branding, but then 99% of all social networking sites have ads on them, so I don’t think that matters.  In fact, for $29 per month, you can take control of the ads (or get rid of them).

So let’s do a cost benefit analysis.  It took me a month to figure out how to tweak WordPress (let’s say 20 hours), and maintaining it is about an hour a month.  Even if I only value my time around $20 an hour, that’s $400 to setup, and $240 for maintenance.

Ning - 15 minutes to setup, and maintenance is seemless.  Even if I paid to remove the ads, we’re talking $360 per year.  While it’s a little cheaper for Wordpress, there are 1000 more features on Ning that I could Never code!

As for my opinion on the ads – who cares, leave them.  What about the domain name?  Who cares again.  For instance, look at the following:

Company A has a website:
www.companya.com

Their Blog is at
www.blog.companya.com

Their Social Network/Member site would be
www.companya.ning.com

Ning, Blog, blah blah blah – people aren’t so worried abou that stuff anymore.  I definitely dont’ think you should have ads on your website, but the rules on a social network site are much more relaxed.

Go find your passion, get your members, and go ning!