I Still Suck At Building Web Communities

a while ago, i was talking with my friend (hot amy) about creating a web community for her to use for her family website (sheeleys.org). shortly after she agreed to be my guinea pig, i had set up a quick web community for her and she had played around with the site to familiarize herself with managing that community. unfortunately, i still suck at building web communities because i never got around to actually making the site look "finished" with my personal testing.

as a joke, i considered using my picture for the administrator profile, and thus becoming an honorary sheeley in her web community. the instigator that i am, i thought it would be funny if the sheeley clan saw some asian looking guy and was like "who is that sheeley and how is he related to us?!?" needless to say, i didn't upload my picture.

anyway, a couple of days ago i began to make the web community look a little more polished. (pictured below is the original banner i had created for her web community.)



might i add, finding pictures of the sheeley family online... not as easy as i thought, especially when you consider the fact that there is a family site with pictures of the sheeley family.

regardless, hot amy thought the banner was cool, but wondered if i could go with a more st. louis/boston theme (her family has ties to those respective cities.) well, i tried another stab at it. (pictured below is my second take.)



hopefully she'll like this second one.

I Suck At Building Web Communities

yesterday during lunch at the 21st amendment, my friend (hot amy) and i were discussing her family's web site (www.sheeleys.org). one of the things that i admire about hot amy (aside from the fact that she reads this blog and also aside from the fact that she is hot) is her forward thinking. she comes up with intriguing ideas like the edietitian web site, the custom jewelry website, the medical alert jewelry tags, etc.

anyway, she had asked about the capabilities of blogger.com (which is what this blog is a part of) because she thought about using the application for her family's web site (instead of the current set up that she has for the site). her family's web site is primarily used for displaying photos. thus, hot amy thought that the ability for users to post comments would be a great thing to have for her family site.

naturally, that got me thinking. i suck at building web communities. i am currently working on a social networking project (which is responsible for the creation of this blog, my facebook account, and my linkedin account among other things). thus, i proposed that she create a web community to use for her family's web site using an existing community building application. the only catch, however, was that i could use her community to become familiarized with that particular application.

i was originally going to create a test community called "mikespace" or something similar and invite all of my friends to join in so that i could test out the application. but, it seemed more appealing to have an actual real world use for testing the application. (which is not to say i still won't create "mikespace")

needless to say, hot amy agreed. so, we'll see how it goes.