Online social networks are all the rage these days. To be honest, I'm a little older than the average MySpace, Facebook or  Friendster member and spend more time thinking about keeping my girls safe on—or preferably off, for as long as possible—these social networks than actually browsing them. A few hundred million people are registered users on these top three networking sites. However, if you want to create your own custom social network, then Ning is the place for you.

Ning was developed to allow users to create customizable networks around their own specific interests. With few technical skills, users can control the design and features on their Ning. However, if a user is brave enough to request the code for their social network—or hire someone to create new features—the possibilities for Ning are pretty incredible.

At JLB we've worked on two Ning sites recently, creating social networks for local non-profit organizations. It is interesting to see "behind the scenes" of a site of this caliber while trying to decipher the code to tailor a Ning to a client's specifications. We created unique designs for the social networks, added a PayPal feature and altered the group structure to allow flexibility for members.

It seems that more individuals and companies are becoming interested in Ning because of its customizable capabilities. In the last year, 25,000 new applications have been created for Ning and visitors to the site have increased ten-fold. Hopefully we'll have the opportunity to create more social networks and learn more about Ning. I'm interested to see how Ning continues to stack next up to MySpace, Facebook and Friendster as social networking continues to grow and evolve on the internet.

That is, just as long as that color matches the rest of your color scheme. What’s that you say? You haven’t planned out what your color scheme is going to be yet and you are just randomly putting colors together? Well stop right there! Help has arrived.

There are several sites out there that can help you on your way to an aesthetically pleasing website. After all, you don’t want to be that site, and you know the one that I am talking about. The one that has the black background, white text and blue, red and purple links! Well, do you? I didn’t think so. To help you avoid that fate, I’ll talk about a couple that I use myself in deciding on a color palette to work from.

ColorJack: Sphere has a very handy tool so that when you move any one of the color choice dots around on the color sphere, the other dots are adjusted accordingly to give you a multi-color palette. This can then be exported to Photoshop, Illustrator or even to a simple URL with a click of the mouse. There are many tweaks and settings for the advanced designer but it is so easy even a small child could create a great looking color scheme here.

Well Styled’s Color Scheme Generator II uses a similar style for selecting your base colors and it also allows you to choose quick variations on the scheme such as pastels, pales, and contrasts easily. It shows your palette choices in an easy to copy and paste manner to the side.

Kuler from Adobe allows you to browse and grab themes from other users or create your own. The cool thing they have here is that you can even upload a photo of your own and it will analyze it, extract the colors and create a suitable palette to use with it. If you don’t have your own photo, you can just use the interface they have with Flickr and choose one from there. You can join the community and save your themes and they even have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

COLOURlovers describes itself as “a resource that monitors and influences color trends.” They have a large community of contributors and lots to explore. You can create new palettes and patterns here that you can save and share with others as well as use for yourself. This site is definitely worth a visit.

There are many more out there that do many of the same things, but the most important thing to know is that unless you just happen to have a degree in graphic design, chances are you may want to use a site like one of those the next time you start to build a website.

I can already hear most of you that know anything about web development grunting and groaning.  I know, it’s much like forcing a senior in high school to go back and learn the multiplication tables.  But this article isn’t for the senior, it isn’t for the seasoned professional.  It’s for those just building their foundation in the development world.

That said, web standards are open specifications continuously developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the simple goal of normalizing the many ways a website, or web page more specifically, is authored.  This is not to say that the W3C is backing up some mainstream web authoring program, such as Dreamweaver, and moving for all developers to do the same, rather the code used to build those web pages.

Just being an intro to a series on web standards, I don’t plan on going into depth just yet on the specific uses for standards or exactly how a compliant page is built.  But I do want to stress how important web standards are and a few quick reasons why.

There’s a whole host of ways to organize content on a website.  One can use tables, divs, (un)ordered lists, etc. paired along with inline or embedded cascading style sheets (CSS) to style the enclosed elements.  CSS can be included inline with an element, embedded in the page head or inserted in its own specific file that each page is linked to.

Imagine for a moment that you’ve been given a math problem that can be solved any of 50 ways and, depending on which way, could take anywhere from 50 lines to 150 lines to solve.  This only gets even harder when none of these ways is necessarily the “right” way and you’re learning how to solve it from 12 different sources.

See what I’m getting at here?  Wouldn’t it be easier if there was one widely recognized way to solve that problem (be it the math problem mentioned above or a website)?  This is the simplest goal of web standards.  They aim to solve the problem of developing a website in a clear, concise, uniform manner that can be passed from author to author with little or no confusion.

Hopefully by this point, I’ve at least given any new to the world of web development the desire to go the extra mile in learning to build and alter websites the right way and not just the quickest.

...Next week Building a W3C Compliant Page From Scratch

It was a long time coming.

That's probably how Dorie Bolze and her crew at the Harpeth River Watershed Association (HRWA) felt by the time we finished the development of their new website.

In truth, it had taken us a little longer than usual. But the site the HRWA wanted was actually a pretty tall order. See, the HRWA's old site was completely HTML-based. And there were a TON of pages.

So, Team JLB not only had to conceive of a stunning graphic design, but we also had to wrap it inside a very functional, dynamic management system. The CMS du jour? A little Nashville ditty known as SiteMason.

HRWA had heard of this nationally renown CMS (content management system) before coming to JLB with its task list. Team JLB has worked with SiteMason on several projects before (Sewanee - The University of the South, Decatur Heritage Christian Academy and The Williamson Herald, to name a few). So everyone was happy. Now the fun part - building the site.

After honing the graphic design with precision, Team JLB coded a solid CSS-based XHTML layout for the Web pages. Then, we wrapped the design into XSL, SiteMason's preferred dynamic programming language. Using a few SiteMason tools, like the Page Builder, the Custom Form and the News Publisher, we delivered a highly functional site that allows HRWA reps to update and create content on the fly. The best part? No one on the HRWA staff needs to know any "technical" code. And no one needs any additional software.

In fact, the HRWA can access its management system from any Web browser in the world on any computer in the world (as long as they remember their login info). And updating text and images is as easy as knowing how to use Microsoft Word. The interface is that simple!

One more thing - for kicks - Team JLB added a fully functional slideshow to the home page of the site. Now HRWA reps can update, with relative ease, the photos that fade in and out there. No need for Photoshop or Flash or any other cumbersome development program. It only takes a couple of clicks to upload an entire photo album from the HRWA's hard drives to their Web server.

Is the HRWA pleased with their new site?

"THANK YOU for all of your hard work on our new Web site. It is just beautiful!" writes Dorie Bolze, Executive Director for the Harpeth River Watershed Association. "If you would like a testimonial for your Web site from us, let us know. We’d love to be listed as one of your satisfied clients."

Recently, we launched a website for a local PR firm - Gray Public Relations.

What makes this site important and unique for our firm is that it represents the culmination of a rapidly shifting way we approach website design and implementation.

From the very beginning, we chose to be deliberate about the way we laid out the site - keeping in mind the end result would need to be something that not only looked good but was easy to navigate, delivered up search engines a wealth of well-tagged content and allowed our clients to post their own news on the fly. At the end of the day, now that the site has launched, we can say with conviction that we achieved those goals.

Consider:

* The graphic design for Gray PR's site sits on a gray background with a nearly hidden flowery flourish. The size of the content area is fixed, and guarantees that just about any visitor will be spared from the side and bottom scroll.

* The coding infrastructure takes advantage of our ever-growing familiarity with strict CSS, XHTML markup, while at the same time allowing us to feature interactive elements (like the lightbox popup images on the home page, under the headline, "results").

* AND the tagging of content within the site is pretty darn good, if we say so ourselves. Although the home page is more or less images (client's strict decision), the rest of the site pages contain deliberate <h1> and <h2> coded text. We know how important it is for this PR firm to perform well in organic searches for sites of a similar nature (note to self: the world of PR and marketing is very competitive). So, we wanted our clients to have a foundation for the best possible start when this site launched.

But what makes me (maybe not our Creative Director, but me) most excited about this site is the seamless integration we created between the site pages and the site blog. This blog, or News section, is the coup de gras for the site's guaranteed SEO positioning. Not only does the blog look like the rest of the site, but its pages are programmed to output data in a way that is primed for search engine spider indexing.

So now, the more pages our clients create about their work, their clients or related events, the more successful their site will be in those all-important search engine battles. To be sure, it won't happen all at once... but give it time and our (sinister?) plan will start working. You might Google "public relations franklin, tn" someday in the not-too-distant future and find yourself staring squarely at two amiable (and very capable) public relations professionals who you're all-of-a-sudden interested in knowing.

The best part? It won't be coincidence that brought you there...