subject: How To Start Your Own Social Bookmarking Site [print this page] How To Start Your Own Social Bookmarking Site
So the chances are, unless you are very particular about exactly what you want and have a large amount of money to spend, you will probably be creating your new website using a cms or content management system, which is a pre created script that can create a site like this for you, offer you an admin panel through which you can manage it without having to mess around with the source code, and also get templates and modules to add onto it so as to customize your social bookmarking site to make it precisely how you would like it to be.
In my own personal opinion and experience Pligg is the best one to use. There are lots of templates, both free and premium that you can buy to get the right web design without having to actually be an expert in web design yourself, and also plenty of modules, also both free and for sale, which you can use to add all sorts of extra features. There is also a forum to help you, where you can ask questions, get advice, and see what other people are doing with pligg.
But before you start there are things which you should now about how to start and manage a social bookmarking website as a business or hobby.
The first thing is that you will get lots of fairly shady submissions. You therefore have to make a choice - allow links to porn, illegal activities and all of the rest - which means that you can't have Google AdSense adverts and would have to find other ways to monetize your site if you wanted to run it as a business, or alternatively you must devote your own time to checking through and weeding out the spam. And it will take your time, because no automated system can catch everything.
The other thing is that because there are lots of calls to SQL databases involved in a site like this they are generally quite heavy on server resources. So if you want to set up your new website on a cheap shared hosting plan then that s fine, but you should be aware that you will quickly outgrow it, even at a level of traffic which could easily be handled by a cheap hosting package if you were running a blog or store.
Dean Walsh runs a USA social bookmarking site and also writes articles on starting an online business from home such as this start web design business article.
