How to Create a Question and Answer Website Like Quora: In-Depth Guide

Quora is a website where users can ask their questions and get answers. Also, the service gives an opportunity to answer questions asked by other users, edit and update answers after a while, and organize them. Also, Quora allows you to follow certain topics, questions, and people. Their activities will be displayed on a user’s feed.

According to Adam D’Angelo, the founder & CEO of Quora, there are more than 200 million monthly unique visitors.

Before you create question and answer website like Quora, let’s get acquainted with it. This platform has a simple and intuitive design. It’s easy for visitors to start using it from the main page by scrolling to the latest questions from different categories. Near the ‘Home’ button there is the ‘Answer’ one. Clicking on it, users can find topics they may be interested in or were asked to answer. Then there are ‘Spaces’ that are collections and communities created around shared interests and tastes, so users can follow any space. The last tab is ‘Notification’, intended to notify about any activities connected to a user.

All these tabs are simple and understandable for visitors, so they make a website pretty straightforward and user-friendly.

Follow these steps to create your own Q&A website.

• Step 1. Analyze the competitors’ websites, e.g. Quora.
• Step 2. Find a web app development company to assist you.
• Step 3. Create a user-friendly and intuitive design.
• Step 4. Develop several vital features for your website and launch an MVP.
• Step 5. Create a promotional strategy to engage users.
• Step 6. Build several unique features to make your website special.
• Step 7. Consider ways to monetize your question and answer website.
• Step 8. Update your website regularly.

According to the steps mentioned above, functionality is vital to know for answering how to make website like Quora. There are several features that helped Quora become successful.

Activity Feed

This part consists of recent activities about interesting content for the user. So, this feed is shown on the home page and helps organize the content. On Quora, you can follow two main fields: topics and people.

Following the topic, you see all the questions and answers tagged with this topic. The same happens when you follow people — all content marked with them is shown. So, when you create website like Quora, you should consider the activity feed functionality.

Following topics

The opportunity to follow topics is quite convenient. When you sign in the Quora account, you can choose topics from the database. So when the user sees the question they are interested in, they can follow the topic and get all the updates. By the way, on the right side of the page, there are ‘Related Questions’. This section gives an opportunity to find new questions that are connected to the chosen one. As a result, users are able to explore Quora more convenient and quicker.

Commenting the answer

How to make a website Quora like providing a live conversation among users? At the bottom of the answer, there is ‘Add comment’ bottom. So, every user can comment on a certain answer and ask the author any related question to start a discussion.

Sharing questions and answers

If you think about how to create website Quora, and what basic features to implement, you may find out that it also provides an opportunity to share any question or answer on social media linked to the user account. The platform offers sharing opportunities via Twitter, Facebook or any other website.

User profile

There is a page where users can write a description of themselves as well as add photo. The user needs to add a headline that means a short bio. Headline and description provide a piece of detailed information about users and their interests. Answering how to create a website Quora, you should also pay attention to such a piece of functionality.

Home page

The Quora home page gives a visitor all updates of the tops answered or ranked questions. It also offers to discover new people and topics.

Spaces

Spaces is a new Quora feature. Thinking about how to create a website like Quora and what to include into a functionality list, you should care about this feature implementation: it allows people to build communities based on common interests as well as to search within these ‘Spaces’ and find answers. Questions posted to space can be answered only by contributors of the space.

The whole concept of Q&A websites is based on the opportunity to exchange the content and share ideas with a community. The content should contain external links, photos, GIFs, videos, etc.

Before you find out how to make website Quora similar by its functionality and design, learn a little more about promotion techniques it's creators used to acquire first visitors.

Quora was not always as popular as it is nowadays. In the interviews, it's founders pointed out that they had no audience and content in the very beginning, so they had to find ways for attracting first users. How did they make question answer website popular and appealing for customers?

After the launch, founders have spent several months creating content on their own to see first users coming. They were asking and answering questions from their accounts.

If you are trying to create a question and answer website, you need to build a community and the strategy above may work pretty well for you. Nobody wants to surf an empty website, so make sure it has some valuable content.

One more thing, it’s better to make a question and answer website with less variety of content and emphasize on what you are really good at if you’re filling the website with content on your own. This way, you will provide visitors with valuable content and increase the chances that they will return to your website.

Websites like Quora demand well-thought-out UI/UX design and flexible databases to work fast and to be eye-catching.

Talking about user attraction, there are several ways you should consider while deciding how to create website like Quora.

Advertisement

You can use paid search, social media advertising and so on. But it’s better to consider your objectives beforehand. Each paid channel has it's own advantages and disadvantages.

Content creation

If the question and answer website provides quality content, users start being more active and tend to trust. As a result, it’s possible to get more traffic via shares and referrals when you build question and answer website.

Email newsletters

Quora tends to send letters once a week. There are some top questions that you’re interested in, and they are typically highlighted in letters as well as other essential information for your consideration.

Social networks

How to make a website like Quora popular? Use the power of social networks. They will help you generate more traffic. You can create a page on social networks where your target audience hangs out. By the way, Quora is present on Facebook and Twitter.

According to the most recent research, Quora has about 200 million monthly active users and was valued at $1,8 billion. The platform has been opened to advertisers since 2016. In fact, advertising is the only monetization model Quora is using at the moment.

Advertisement

Quora has successfully incorporated ads in the revenue model because it focuses on showing relevant advertisements from relevant advertisers. Ads don’t seem like something unusual on the Quora website. On the other hand, this platform doesn't want to use sponsored posts. So, users get good answers but not promoted content.

But there are more possible monetization models for the question and answer website. Below we will discuss three of the most popular ones you should consider when deciding how to create question answer website.

Offer premium features

It’s good to develop additional features and offer to purchase them. For instance, there can be improved analytics. Quora shows just the quantities of users, without any kind of detailed information (e.g. demographic data) about users that read answers or follow users.

Accept donations from users

When you think about how to make question answer website providing users with the best content, it’s possible to ask them to donate money to support the project. This monetization model is actively used by Wikipedia. To make this process as simple as possible, it’s better to integrate PayPal or Stripe.

Google AdSense

Nowadays Google provides two advertisement tools — Ads and AdSense. It’s possible to earn money on Google AdSense by placing the ads on the website. Every time a user clicks on the advertisement, your platform gets money.

Creating a question and answer website requires studying how to promote user engagement, how to organize the content properly and more. So, we’ve prepared several hints for you.

Engage your visitors

What factors are important when considering how to create question and answer website? Development time is the first of them. For instance, Quora allows their users to follow an unlimited number of questions, topics, spaces, and users to increase the time spend on their website.

Also, every question page on Quora contains a section called ‘Related Questions’ that immerse users deeper into surfing the website.

Integrate social network

In addition to a good-old login and password registration, the majority of modern websites allow their users to sign in via social networks like Twitter, Facebook or Google. Also, it’s better to add an opportunity to share posts/answers.

Add some relevance

It’s vital to deliver relevant data to users to save their time and make interaction It’s vital to deliver relevant data to users to save their time and make interaction with the platform smoother. For example, Quora sends notifications if the question asked by the user got a new answer.

The combination of notifications and followed topics allows delivering only relevant and customized content to users. The content placed on Quora is also organized in such a way to increase the total spent time. So, considering how to develop a website like Quora and how to enhance it, you should care about the resource data relevance: the more relevant content you offer, the better engagement rate you’ll get.

However, not only the accuracy of the content makes sense but it's quality as well. Quora uses a blue tick to indicate users who are experienced in a certain field.

Use emails wisely

It’s better not to send emails without a reason. Instead, focus on replacing quantity with quality. For instance, you may send weekly digests based on users preferences. On the other hand, websites like Quora send questions that can be interesting for users. Moreover, adding links to your email letters is an extremely good idea since users can go to the topic they’re interested in.

Developing a Q&A website, it’s important to consider the tech stack of the project. Below we will discuss two variants on how to create a question and answer website.

Quora is a platform that completely depends on the participation of users. As a result, it was important to choose the programming language that is reliable, flexible, and simple.

Of course, such languages as PHP, Java, C#, and others were considered, but Quora creators decided to utilize Python.

There are some clear benefits of using this coding language when deciding how to build a website Quora similar.

• Python has a solid ecosystem that supports deep learning.
• This programming language has great readability and efficiency. So, it’s better to use Python than PHP for developing front-end and back-end for a platform like Quora.
• Python was chosen because it’s a language with a simple syntax. It’s suited for prototyping.
• This coding language allows designers, data analysts, and non-engineers to develop code for Quora.
• Fast ideation with Python provides an opportunity to save time and money.
• Python has an extensive standard library and ecosystem.
• If we compare Java and Python, the last one guarantees faster and easier writing of programs with better inter-opportunity.

The team of our company’s website developers offers to utilize JavaScript answering how to make a question answer website.

There are some advantages to this decision:

• JavaScript language provides a high development speed and prototyping.
• This coding language has a lot of ready-made solutions. So, the development process is fast and easy.
• JavaScript is easily integrated with various technologies.
• JavaScript language allows development for various platform, including front-end and back-end (Node.js), mobile development (React Native or NativeScript), and desktop (if necessary, Electron or NW.js).

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