How to Create a Website like Quora?

Quora is the most popular Q&A website today used by thousands of people every day. This illustrious platform has achieved gigantic success and surpassed Yahoo Answers and other time-honored portals with its envious popularity.

Quora emerged as a breath of fresh content in the world of topic-based knowledge-sharing platform. It became the evidence to the fact that people heartily appreciate having a website where they can read interesting details on diverse topics via Questions and Answers theme.

In this post, we are going explore the essential components you need to create a smashing website like Quora. But first, let’s see Quora’s success secret.

Quora’s Success Story

 

The founder & CEO of Quora, Adam D’Angelo reveals that their website has over 200 million monthly unique visitors. So how this incredible miracle happened? The leading components that made Quora a Q&A brand include:

• Excellent web development approach
• Simple and intuitive design
• Intensive focus on specific niche
• Trending categories with high engagement

Quora believed in niche-only approach as a differentiating element instead of capturing all sorts of question categories. The topics initially revolved around business and general tips such as marketing, entrepreneurship, and success stories.

As time progressed, their content expanded (technology, art, fashion, health, books and more) and the audience flourished.

A few main components of Quora website are:

• Home button
• Answer
• Notification tab
• Spaces to follow (based on interests and tastes)

User can navigate through all the tabs easily as they are kept simple and straightforward. The space was open to like-minded people who share their knowledge and insight on variety of topics and eventually bred a thriving community.

Prominent Features of an ideal Q&A Platform

Quora is excellent example of creative web development. If Quora is what you look forward to while developing a Q&A platform, you will notice a few of its obvious noteworthy features and attributes, including its intuitive and simple design, content categories and personalization capability.

Users will effortlessly catch trending questions and answers across diverse categories. As they create an account and add personal content categories and interests, they see more streamlined, related questions on their favorite topics in their feed or via email.

The prominent features of Quora:

• Users Profile
• Follow topics
• Interest-based topic recommendations
• Activity Feed
• Internal Messaging
• Sharing content on Social media

An expert web development company can help you build all these and more complex features of a Q&A website like Quora. Selecting the right company is the key to creating a perfect platform.

User Acquisition: How Quora Acquire Users From Scratch?

Finding a niche and then mastering it – this is the simple and straightforward principle that Quora capitalized on and helped them pioneer an all-new Q&A platform back then.

Like any business startup, Quora did not achieve success overnight and had to implement a reader-friendly, interest-oriented readership enhancing strategy in place.

Quora was initially challenged by the task of attracting loyal users without target content on its platform.

If you are an expert, it would be easy for you to create and post the right content of high quality and grab attention. Quora learned a good lesson, though.

They realized that best way to acquire new loyal users and start generating constant revenue is to be discovered by users.

If you are planning to imitate success like Quora, you can employ the techniques such as:

Self-Generated Content

In its incumbent phase, Quora founders and web development experts decided to experiment and create their own content to see the immediate response.

Though it looked a little trivial, they created their own Quora account and profiles started sharing questions and answers internally.

The formula eventually worked and resulted into expanding community of knowledge sharers. Focus strongly on building a rich community of supporters and users if you wish to create a Q&A website.

Your empty website will not pull in thick crowd. Hence, make sure you are active with rich content so that more active traffic of readers will swarm in via references and sharing.

Advertisement

Advertise the arrival of new Q&A website using paid Google search and social media ads as well as creative social media campaign.

Think of all the objectives you have in this area and act prudently. Both paid and free advertising channels have their own pros and cons.

Quality and Niche

Instead of focusing on and getting confused with huge variety of content, it is advisable to know your niche and target market and flaunt expertise in what areas you can offer immense value.

Master the content subjects you are confident about to supply valuable content to website users and have them returning to website.

Theme and Simplicity

Quora has one more attraction which is a thoughtful, intuitive and eye-catching web design with utmost simplicity and interactive features.

Email Newsletters

Quora users remain engaged with the website content because Quora also sends its marketing newsletters once a week with hot questions that might interest them.

Social Networks

You can’t go without utilizing the full-fledged potential of social media these days. To enhance visibility and spread awareness around your Quora-like website, making your presence known on social networks is crucial.

Create a page and invite more users to join and discuss the website features. Quora has gained a lot of traction through its presence on Facebook and Twitter.

Monetization of Q&A Website

 

 

Completely free-to-use and built on community, Quora can brag about 200 million monthly active users at the moment.

Due to being open to advertisements since 2016 (which is its only monetization model), its value has now reached $1.8 billion.

Advertisement

Quora has stood out from the beginning by incorporating only highly relevant ad standards. Its ad-based revenue model has been enormously successful due to its brilliant ability to present advertisements in an unobtrusive fashion without interrupting readers’ ongoing activities.

They have collaborated with only relevant advertisers whose ads don’t repel Quora website users. Also, there is no quick, self-serving promotional content or sponsored posts which allows users to see only good-quality answers in their feed.

However, a professional web development company can aid you in building more effective monetization solutions.

Google AdSense

This is a harmless and reliable revenue generation source provided by Google. Using its AdSense ad tool, it is possible to earn by placing the ads on your Q&A website. When a user clicks on the website ad, you get some money.

Premium Features

More like freemium app model, your Q&A web platform can also contain certain premium features for users to purchase.

The web development specialists you hire can integrate great analytics in your Quora-like website just like what you witness on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

The site users can leverage this to view more demographic details about users who read, follow or upvote your posts.

Technology Stack for the Website Development

 

 

Of all coding languages, Quora creators decided to squeeze the power of Python to develop a user-oriented, user-friendly website, a portal where users are the regular contributors. Since users drive content, the programming language is supposed to be:

• Reliable
• Dynamic
• Flexible
• Simple
• Efficient & fast

Python is a highly recommendable Coding language because:

• Python is the ideal ecosystem for deep learning experience.
• Python is more readable, flexible and efficient which makes it better option for developing front-end and back-end of the website than PHP.
• Python offers little margin for error as it comes with a simple syntax suitable for easy prototyping.
• The coding is so easy even designers and data engineers can write code.
• Its extensive library and ecosystem offers adequate readymade solutions
• It saves a lot of time in development cycle due to its rapid ideation
• When compared with Java, python ensures much faster, simple and more efficient writing

You also have other options to build a website like Quora such as PHP, JavaScript (compatible for mobile, desktop and back-end and Front-end) as well as C#.

Get started with the Development

Building a website like Quora is not that complex or challenging though, due to certain technical precision, you always need thorough expertise and unique approach of professional a web development service.

Also, it is good to partner with a right company if you wish to build unique custom features for your portal. The process requires good amount of strategic time, resources and keen insight into trending scenario.

Probytes is a reputed web development company that has gained years of experience in building mobile apps, social media apps and functional websites with ample capabilities. We offer flexible working models that align with your exact project requirements.