Design Exercise 14.....Social Network Integration

Research and identify at least two uses of social network integration not given in lecture. This can include RSS feeds. (research twitter and rss feed scripts) Identify relevant social networks for your project and discuss pros and cons (300 words on blog) and start designing a practical way of integrating into your particular project.

In my new project i am required to have aspects of social networking integrated into my site. I want to have the most relevant social networks linked to my site. For example if i choose an artist i may not want to incorporate YouTube but maybe flickr to show off more of the work and generate more interest and views. The idea of integrating social networking into the clients website is to draw users to the site from these social networking sites.

I think the most important social networking site for my client to have is Facebook. Facebook is by far the largest of all the social networking site and has around 400 million users!! This is a great way to promote and advertise a client. According to official Facebook statistics 200 million users log on each day. If a client is exposed to this many viewers each day surely they would generate visits to the main website where a Facebook script can be embedded. Facebook is also good as photos and videos can be posted to further promote the client.

I have chosen to create an artists website, I believe that Facebook is ideal to promote and link the client.

Twitter is also very important when thinking along the lines of social networking. There are an awful lot of designers and companies using Twitter that are all following different people. I think it is vital to implement Twitter for my client into my new website. There are millions of new 'tweets' each day, some are talk between two people and some are even jobs that are available

The other obvious social networks that i could use on my website are YouTube and Flickr. These two are slightly different than Facebook and Twitter as they are more about sharing content. Facebook and Twitter is based on talking and letting people know what you are doing and whats happening. YouTube and Flickr is the perfect place to share images, videos and design work. These social networking sites could be vital in promoting and displaying any design work that my client may have.

New Major Project Set.....

Well last week I had my next major project set for my Interactive Media module. The brief is as follows.

Brief: Artist/Arts Organisation Website
Design and build a artist / arts organisation website. A site which acts as a promotional website for an individual/organisation and which will increase both profile and online traffic for the client.
The choice of artist is wide and could include musician, craftsperson, writer etc etc. These must be real individuals either known to the designer or if not known then with sufficient background material available (on or offline) to make an effective ‘mock’ website (not historical or dead artists!). They can be real ‘live’ commissions if available.
Design, build and deploy a minimum 5 page website that includes at least
3 interactive FLASH pages*/banners/widgets of various sizes.(*you may construct in full page Flash however it will require alternative html/css pages for accessibility) you may deploy more if coherent within design. The site will also include a basic ‘diary/journal’ page in CSS/XHTML that populated by drawing on a mysql database using php. (this may be constructed within Flash if able).
Consider the data that your application needs to store and data that it needs to collect from a user. Consider the key operations that the application must perform. Use this to decide the database entities and their relationships. Create an ERD to document your database design (logical database design). Create the database using MySQL and populate it with dummy data.


Over the next couple of days I will be deciding on the client for my project so I can design my site and also plan what content I will include. This ties in well with Design Exercise 14 which was set today.