posted by chris.
From my previous experiences of setting up community sites i've found the most gratifying experience of all is watching the memberbase grow.
I would associate a growing memberbase with being sucessful, so intially I would launch sites consisting of only one page, the sign-up page.
I launched want2cam back in 2003, promoted the idea and waited for sign-ups.
It didn't really make sense launching an unbusy, member-less social networking site... I figured nobody would want to sign up to it!
The solution to this was to wait for 1000 sign-ups, and work on new features in the meantime. Once I reached the figure I would launch the basic stuff like profiles, and messaging.
I became rather surprised when it only took a week to reach the figure, the most inspiring trigger for quickly building the rest of the site.
I'd recommend starting off this way if you handle quite a few sites, you can measure which one is receiving the most interest, and work towards building that one up.
Which brings us to the first SNAPI tutorial, how to build a sign-up form using ASP.NET.