How difficult is it to create a website like Facebook?

I want to create a website like Facebook. What are the skills required for a website like Facebook?

 

Your goal is not to start with a project that is as advanced as they are now. But to find a niche that you are able to build from the ground up. From simple and easy to understand. Make it useful for people and let it grow organically.

What you need is social proof that people like your product and has the potential to reach critical mass and exponential growth. From there, you can invest or find people to invest, and then add more resources to grow your site to something similar to Facebook in terms of their size and complexity.


A web designer would not be able to create a website like Facebook alone. There is a lot of programming behind the scenes, and the Facebook website requires a variety of services, tools, and programming languages to make up its core infrastructure. At the front end, their servers run a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with Memcache.For the database, Facebook utilizes MySQL because of its speed and reliability. The backend programming is written in a variety of different programming languages including C++, Java, Python, and Erlang.

 

Creating a website like Facebook is easy considering you now have insight to all features it possesses. Building it from scratch would be pretty hard though. You would need to know HTML, Javascript, Ajax, PHP, SQL and several other programming languages to have a website that would attract users.

This isn't a project that is meant to be done alone, when Mark first started theFacebook it didn't look nowhere near the look it has today, but with the help of his team he made it into a monster website it is.

 

It is not so hard to build and host it. There are some very affordable scripts you can buy for only a few dollars and the hosting packages are also very affordable. The problem is to drive the new users and traffic to your social site, because you have to know there are so many websites that offer practically the same.

The users are very demanding and they are not likely to change their habits easily, so you have to think of something special and useful. Also, think about the website that will attract younger population, mostly the teens because if they like it they will drag in huge number of tehir friends.

Many webmasters tried and failed, but tehir failure had nothing with the programming side and how smooth their web design is, they simply didn't find the right angle to attract people in and to keep them around.

 

Firstly, I am not an expert programmer. To build a website like Facebook, if you are not an experienced programmer, you would need assistance from someone who has had forehand experience in building complex applications.

There are a lot of things to decide namely:

• The choice of the programming language to code.
• The number of users that you are targeting.
  
• The choice of the database, for more users you would need a more reliable and scalable database.
• The front-end design and animations.

There should be dedicated teams to handle all the operations involved. It is not an individual activity. Hope this helps.

 

Facebook during initial stages was written completely in PHP. As the service scaled the site components were written in Python and JavaScript. Currently a large portion of Facebook is written in JavaScript to speed up the service.

As a solo coder you need to understand HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP.

Site like Facebook is created with following features -

1. Multiple databases for User data, post data, ratings, advertising system etc.
2. JavaScript calls for quicker data access.
3. Python calls for server side management.
4. PHP for front end design and access.

Usually this sort of work requires team of developers. Initially you can start such site with 5-10 developers.

 

Create website like Facebook, its hard for non-professional, I recommend you doing this before creating website:
1. Study Databases ( you can learn it for user login, user post, rate, store data).
2. Study HTML, CSS, PHP ( combination of those skills can make a good view website ).
3. Study Cyber Security ( for protecting your user from hacker ).
4. Study Python.
5. Study how to create a user-friendly website and multi support website.
7. Study Photoshop, CorelDraw , and other picture making program (if you cant just pay someone to create it)
8. Study how to buy domain, hosting plan

There some technique for growing your website:
1. Create some ads in other website for advertising your website.
2. Create Sign Ups offer in other pay website ( I not absolutely recommend you ).
3. Join and pay for google advertising plan, Make a tag = chat , social , talk .
4. Creating picture and animation for your website.
5. Joining your website to some search engine.
6. Share your website to your friend and suggest them to signs up in your website

If you cant make it yourself, Start recruiting crew for your project, I recommend your family, close friend, and your friend first. Because they can easily work together with you and they set a normal prices for their work if you cant find anyone search in your regional, Don't try online recruit first because you don't know their experience very well and they hard to meet or communicate your website project.

I recommend your website in first launch or in two month after launch don't place to much advertise, the people will not love the site and they back to their other chat website or Facebook, After two month you can place more advertisement but don't try to fill whole website with advertisement. That really really annoying for your website user.

Don't craft your website very similar with Facebook website, because Facebook will report you to search engine or maybe your hosting sites that can block or maybe delete your website.

That my tips, I wait your website launch

 

I don't think it would be difficult. I do know you will need to have a team to recreate facebook.

 

To be honest it must be really hard but it seems like a lot of people here are knowledgeable in this field and are giving you good informations so I wish you luck in your website building.

 

If you learn Web Development and how to host your own server, then really... You could set up a social media website like Facebook, you would have to learn a few Programming Languages though, like Python, SQL, HTML, CSS and also study many more things like Cybersecurity and prepare to spend some money for a Domain Name, Website Hosting, etc...

 

Well you will need coders someone who has knowledge in that field. But a person will have to have a history to know how to build sites. Of course it can be easy if you have a history of building sites . But you study something you my eventually be good at what ever it is you want in life.