Most of the basic concepts and approaches you take to designing and build your community site are the same in Khoros Community Classic as they are in Aurora. Aurora just makes them easier, faster, and more fun.

When building your first site, we recommend the following approach.

Basics

• Goals (think before you build): Community Managers are the face of the community. They own the day-to-day management and implementation of the brand’s digital community strategy. As the Community Manager, you are primarily responsible for building and leading your community to align with your company's goals. Apart from these, in support of your company goals, you’ll be working to increase user engagement and advocacy, accelerating innovation, driving sales, and reducing sales costs.
  
  

  Before you start building your community, you must:

  • Understand the audience:

  Who is the intended audience?
  What are they looking for?
  What is their level of experience?

  • Decide the type of content that best:

  meets the audience needs
  drives site traffic
  improves peer-peer communication
  keeps users engaged

  • Understand the stakeholders or internal audiences, including:

  Marketing team
  Product team
  Support team
  Analysts
  Legal team

  The answers to these questions help you develop a community strategy that connects members and your brand content, leading to the structure of your community. Before you start building your community structure, you must understand what your business is trying to accomplish with your community. Hence, the structure of the community must align with the community's goals and objectives.

• Site Structure: When you have figured out the overall purpose and goals for your site and a general idea of the categories and boards you want to launch your site with, it's time to build the skeleton for your site. Check out these Community Structure Best Practices, and when you're ready, start building out the structure of your site.
• Site look and feel: Your site should reflect the colors and personality of your brand. With Aurora Themes, you can create the look and feel for all the visual components of your site. Review your company's brand style guide, and when you're ready to start designing your site's visual theme, head over to the Theme editor in Designer.
• Page design: Aurora includes a complete set of page templates so that all your category, forum, blog, knowledge base, event, idea, and group pages are consistent. You also have complete control over your Community Home Page and Member Profile Page. Start designing how each page on your site should look.

Must-haves

• Roles and permissions: Roles and permissions control what parts of the community members can access and the actions they can perform. Aurora provides some common roles (admin, moderator, new member) out-of-the-box, but you can also create custom roles to mix permissions and give different members elevated capabilities. Like your community structure, start small and focused. Only add more roles if and when you need them. Learn more about Roles and Permissions.
• Member and Feature defaults: When you launch your community, you can define precisely what the default settings are for the member experience and each product feature enabled for your community. Check out the Settings area and review the settings for each community area.

Beyond the Basics

• Groups: Groups deliver an enhanced experience for Community members to engage around a common theme or purpose. Each group has its own configurable set of content types (forum, blog, knowledge base) to organize content and communication. Learn more about Groups.
• Using GraphQL: When you need a bit more power, you (or your community developers) can use GraphQL (Aurora's query language) to access all of Aurora's APIs.