Little changes

I've nearly finished the design for the front page of hooami. In this post, I described how I wanted to make my site look more like Bebo, MySpace and Facebook. I've now finished the design, including the text to make it look more genuine. Sod all the coding I've been doing over the past few months, the copy was one of the hardest things I've done!

In the end, I came up with:

hooami is for everyone

Anyone can join hooami, simply complete the sign up form and upload a photograph of yourself. You don’t even need a valid email address*!

Private property

hooami doesn’t try to connect you with friends or strangers, hooami is all about you.

Fashionable

hooami lets you customise your page layout so that it truly represents you, without having to write the code yourself.

Totally unique

hooami knows that every one of its users is unique – which is why every user needs their own unique profile address.

* Sign in and profile removal requests require the email address entered in the sign up process

I followed the examples set out on Facebook, but completely changed the titles and features to fit my site. I wanted to keep it short so people could read it quickly and easily, and then move on to the sign up page.

I also changed some of the codes - for the header and footer, so that this is included from bas files. That means that if I want to update the footer info, I only need to change one file instead of all of them.

While researching questions for my FAQ, I came across this on MySpace:

How do I add color, graphics, & sound to my Profile page?>

Now, bearing in mind I'd just been looking at MySpaces safety tips Remind your teens to be careful about adding strangers to their friends list", the following sentence seemed a little odd:

If you do not know HTML, you can reach out and make a new friend by asking someone who has color, graphics, and/or sound on their Profile page how they did it. People on MySpace are friendly and always willing to help, so just ask! This is a great way to meet new people!

On the safety page, it says not to speak to strangers and to be aware that what you post on myspace can be seen by anyone. Yet here, Myspace is actually encouraging people who want to customise their page - frequently children - to speak to a stranger in order to do it! Talk about mixed messages! A far better approach would have been to direct people to websites that teach you html, or books. Or, they could make a quite guide for people - not only does that increase site traffic, it stops children googling "myspace layouts" which provides a list of websites ripe with popups/popunders and a whole lot of banner ads.