A public relations company in multiple sectors like entertainment, social activities and it enabled services wanted to develop a social media networking website. The company offered services to individuals as well as corporates. They have offices in major cities of Africa. The company was started by a group of four enterprising visionaries. They had a vision to build a platform for common folks and artists in Africa to come together and collaborate on music, art, dance, and entertainment.
Business Case for the website
Every African in some ways is connected to music, dance or art in his/her own way. They have a natural desire to showcase the artistic talent and stories to community members and the world at large. With easy access to Internet, they have found a new medium to share their entertainment content with the community. While there are several communication channels developed in other parts of the world, the African community needed a platform to showcase their talents in performing arts music, dance, painting etc. The PR company recognized this opportunity to develop a niche social networking website that leveraged the power of user generated media.
This website was distinctive over other Social networking websites due to its focus on media driven collaboration by users via music, videos, pictures and articles. The website also proposed to bring together celebrities like actors, singers, musicians, choreographers, entertainment writers, bloggers and journalists to shape the future of entertainment in Africa. This ambitious project also received encouragement from government levels.
Features in Social Networking Website
This social media networking website helped the African community express and connect with friends, relatives and colleagues through blogs, forums, chat, internal messaging and other communication tools.
The website has dedicated sections that offered quality information and entertaining news, reviews, interviews about the entertainment industry in Africa updated by the seasoned professionals.
Important features of the website are:
- Streaming Media
- Blog
- Internal Messaging
- Forums
- Friends - invite, groups
- Polls
- Events
- User feedback - reviews, voting, like, bookmarking, favorites
- User Categories - The site administrator can monitor the user activity and based on member performance & categorize the member as regular user, writer or an artist.
- Artist Showcase - This section features artists from various walks of entertainment.
- The website is unique in a way that it offers a rich and intuitive interface to upload, share and review entertainment media - music, videos, articles, news and blogs.
Technology
This social networking website has been developed in open source platform - LAMP.
The social networking website development company also used Ajax both in the front end and back end sections which significantly improved the user experience and improved user interface. The website also offered API (Application programming Interface) to software developers to create widgets and applications. These widgets and applications can seamlessly use the activities and information from our website with other platforms.
