Setting up the group site

We decided that the ning.com community was the best tool for us as we are able to control access and security while giving members quite a degree of freedom within the site.

It didn’t take long to get the group site up. I visited ning.com and logged in (I already had a profile from the Tu Diabetes site) went to My Networks – Create your network. It was easy to give the group a name and set up the basic parameters of the group. 

The next step was to layout the main page by dragging and dropping the features I wanted to appear on the page. The next step is to set the theme. You can play around here as much or as little as you like. There are a number of themes that can all be customised to suit.

I then had the opportunities to ask some profile questions of the members. Things such as their location, what they did, what their goals are. You can ask any number of different questions here to help members introduce themselves and to gather information about your members as needed. 

Now click on Launch and the site is up and running.

Before I go, there is one more thing to do before inviting members is to visit Manage – Privacy and check your privacy settings. You can have a public or private group and allow different levels of invitation within a private group. Choose your settings and save and you are ready to go. 

No point giving you the address as this is a closed site for students only, much like the old high school common room where the only people who could go in there were the students in that year.

Next time I’ll go through how we got the group started.