Social Network Integration

There's no getting away from social networks when you're online now. Even the most standard sites such as the BBC are all over social networks like a house on fire.

Why is this?

Well it's all about free promotion and creating a presence when you're online. By various websites being connected to a social network, they're instantly accessible to a world of over 50 Million users (Facebook) and a growing Tweety generation through Twitter. With almost the equivelant of the entire UK population online through Facebook across the world, there's a massive potential to gain access to an endless array of people from all sorts of backgrounds, enableing advertisers to target specific groups and get maximum benefits.

As more and more users post up their details to Facebook to share with their "friends", advertisers are now able to pick out specific infomation and change their displayed adverts according to your preferences. For example, if you're single, you'll gain many adverts for dating agencies, if you're itnerested in fish, you may get scooba diveing ads.

My current project is to create and produce a website for my friend Lucy. As I was never able to finish the site I began for her, I will now use this project to complete it for her, including links to social networks. But which social network is best to use?

Well Lucy already had a facebook and Myspace so it would make sense to utilise these. However, Myspace doesn't really make it very easy to post that content on other pages in the same way you can run your RSS Tweets from Twitter across multiple platforms. Therefore, I'm going to try and steer clear of Myspace due to it's inaccessibility. However, I will use Myspace's idea of being able to broadcast music to your listeners. I'll be creating a mini music device in flash for Lucy to show off her work.

To keep her site up-to-date and relevent, I would like to create a blog feature, but I am unsure as to how I'll do this as of yet. Instead, I will deffinatley try to incorporate her facebook updates and twitter feed as this will keep users up to date, even if the website isn't kept on top of.

By utilising the social network industry, I'll be able to keep Lucy's fan on top of what's happening as they'll have easy access to her reguarly updated sites. This will keep her fans interested and continue their support and come see her when she's off to do a gig.

Displaying her updates directly onto the front page is important as it's current and instant, however I will not be making it a massive element, due to the temptation from users to click off her site and visit Facebook, rather than exploring her website.

Website Reviews

It's time for my few website reviews.

You would've thought that with all the pressure on countries to expand their broadband connectivity that the whole world would be using a pretty speedy connection. This is the case in a lot of countries, however, some major website are still fairly basic. Let's take Google and Facebook for example.

Google is probably the most common and used website in the world, yet it's front end design is very very basic. The website literally is comprised of just the logo "Google" which changes very occasionally and then the search box beneath it. Google has been running for years and year yet it's main search engine's website is still very basic.

Facebook, another world-wide accessed website is also very simple, with a blue banner across the top and a very simple picture below to show the connectivity Facebook has with it's users. Each of these websites have to be accessible across the whole world and on many platforms such as iPhones and other mobile technology, and even games consoles. Therefore, the designs have to stay fairly simple to allow for that adaptation between devices.

As they are both world-wide websites, it could be said that as they reach countries that are less developed, they have to keep their website sizes down to make it accessable to places with lower speed internet connections.

Contrasting these sites to the BBC UK website, we can see some differences.

The BBC website has been created with the UK in mind. Before stating your location on the BBC homepage, its pressumes your in London and displays the weather for that location.

As we look at the website, there's a massive increase in colour and photography. This website has been created for a standard browser and for the UK population. As a developed country it is taken as standard that most UK citizens who are accessing the website will have a fast broadband connection and therefore will be able to see the entire website very quickly, and therefore the site size and loading times haven't been considered as much as the other two websites with larger circulation numbers.

The bright colours on the BBC website will attract all users and the colours change, depending upon what time of day, season or the main headlines are. All in all, the BBC website is made with the UK in mind, considering the standard broadband speed of each household, where as Google and Facebook have had to consider the entire world in their design and have adapted their size and imagery accordingly.