Most of the changes are behind the scenes bug-fixes and tweaks all of which sure ensure a smoother error free experience whilst using the sites.

A big thank-you to everyone involved.

I you are wanting to contact us for new work, please be aware that there will be a delay in us getting back to you.

See you when we get back.

• Shuzak.com | Anatomy of a Successful Social Network
• Social Networking Goes Niche
• The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks - ReadWriteWeb
• fabric of folly: The long tail of social networking

I have been wanting to post here about what we have been doing for some time as some of it is pretty exciting, however due to the huge amount of work and effort the various projects they have thrown our way have required, finding the time to blog has not been easy.

I am being allowed a rest however, in the form of a two week vacation and so now is the perfect time to take stock and post some info on what it is we have been up to.

Going for the Niche

As mentioned briefly on the site news blog, Namemedia have been and are in the process of building and launching niche social networks built on Wordpress and Bbpress, it is this that we have been assisting them with.

A niche social network is simply a social network aimed squarely at a niche interest, be it wine or geeks. You take the classic social network components: user profiles, friends lists, user messaging, forums and groups; and then you tailor the experience towards your intended niche. Throw in expert articles, regularly updated content and a strong multimedia element and there you have it.

Fast and Furious

We began working with them in October, offering Wordpress consultancy and development for the first site Mommy.com. When this launched we moved onto the next two sites, Biking.com & Cycling.com. We moved into the role of lead developer for these and worked within a multi-continent, multi-disciplinary team to bring these sites to launch. Boating.com & Yachting.com were also developed alongside Biking.com and Cycling.com by another team. These all launched quietly just after Christmas. Since then we have been working as project lead on Hotcars.com and Dreamwheels.com as well as pushing, 3 new minor versions (1.1, 1.2 & 1.3) of Biking and Cycling. We managed a small team of developers (There were more, its just they don’t have websites to link to).

More to come…

I intend to write more about the things we have been doing, mostly about some of the things i have learned from working remotely with people on large projects but I also want to talk about some of the things we have been doing with Wordpress, after all, how many social networks do you know that are built on it?

The bane of most web designer is true of me also, I’m never happy and am by far my most demanding, awkward client, often I’m starting another before I’ve even finished the last.

When I took the current version of this website live a couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of my clients wondering where my last version had gone, she preferred that one over the current, that’s the problem with designing for yourself, its the wrong approach, its not me I am trying to please, its mix of both new customers and existing web design peers. I liked the last version, it had impact, I redesigned because although the homepage was good, the design did not work on any of the more content heavy pages, everything was just too big.

When designing for clients you end up designing for two people, you and the client, whilst this isn’t the best way, its better than doing it or one.

What you really need to do is find out what the sites customers want, they are the people you are trying to impress, in fact they are the whole reason you are creating a website at all.

But how? you ask, try one of the following ~

1. Pretend that you are a customer.  This is the cheapest (its free) and can be useful, sit down and think about your customer, be detailed, who is he/she? once you have an idea of who they are, work out why they would want to come to your website, then, how are they going to get there and finally what are the going to want to do when they are there. Its likely that you will have more than one customer type who will have different reasons for coming to you and want different things, that’s fine, work your way through them all individually. Doing all this will help you identify the important things on your website, you can then make sire that these are easily accessible.
2. Ask your current customers. This is pretty easy to do and in some cases can work. Put a feedback form or survey on your website, you may have to give people an incentive to fill it in and be prepared that most won’t. If you do manage to get data back though it can be invaluable in finding out what your customers want.
3. Ask strangers. This can be expensive but if done well will be far more useful than the previous two. Get strangers to sit down in front of your website and ask them to do something, recording their actions etc. can be very useful in discovering areas of your website which are not very good.

Even if you don’t like what people say about your website it is always worth listening, and the beauty of a website over other forms of advertising or media is that it can be changed and improved pretty easily.

Peace out.