I have been working on this site for two years now. I started from scratch, and just slowly built it bit by bit.

http://www.bradsproject.com

It is "A new social network built from scratch, made to balance ease of use, ability to customize, privacy, and interactivity."
Check it out, tell me what you think of the design, flow, layout, and functionality.
I understand if you don't want to sign up, and if so, feel free to still tell me what you think about the login/register/password reset pages.
I'm really interested to get some different eyes on the site and see what more people think.

Thanks!

I think that you need to work on the design, because today design plays a very great role. Try to make more complicated register page with several requered field and with additional inforamation. Work with text - make it more friendly.
And the main thing about the whole project - think about building a specefic social network (about cars or I even don`t know) - this idea can be interesting

Hi Brad.

OK great work keep it up.

I have some observations from my end:

For starters I'm viewing your site in Chrome and FireFox, my IE and Safari are bugging out.

I like how neat and compact the site is however, you could break out of the box one day - maybe get some design ideas from the other social sites.

OK so I went to sign up. I purposely added my first, last name and email address and submitted without adding a password, the page redirected, showed me my errors and reset my fields. It would be much easier for everyone if you add on page javascript validation of the required fields like this page does: haltonautolease.com/GTA-Auto-Leasing-Solutions.asp

Now you have two automated spam checking boxes, you really only need one, with at the very most 4 characters to enter (IMO).

OK so I registered : )

OK the registration complete page is a little dry, as you know it's simply a grey background with black text indicating that the registration was successful. Thank you but again, it could, could be spiced up a little, maybe redirected to the new users member page.

OK now that I was redirected to the home page and ready to log in with my account, I recieved a nice error regarding quick time?



When I clicked OK I was redirected into my account.

I then recieved the same error as I tried to access 'my blog' so I have now left the website.

Brad, thanks for posting and it seems you might have more work to do - as I won't be installing quick time ever...

Other than that, good work in trying and if the quick time issue is something to do on my end well, my apologies for mistaking it for an error on your site.

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Alright, that I can do. Thanks!

Yeah, the reason I did that is because I had a few bot sign-ups previously. It did stop them, but I'm still trying to find a more viable solution.

Haha, fair enough.

You know, I might actually know what was causing this, MAYbe. I have developed a chat/IM feature for the site, sort of like facebook chat, but from scratch. It plays a sound when you get a new IM, but right now lets the browser decide how to play it. I think this is what was happening, the sound was loading. This is a known issue and will be resolved as soon as I am able to purchase Adobe Flash and play the sound using a different method that will be MUCH better.

Oh, and I've disabled the sound for you, so if you're feeling brave, the quicktime issue MAY be resolved (I can only hope, really, haha), and you can check out the rest of the site.

Thanks for your review, I really appreciate it!

Ok, so I've taken a lot of your advice, morestar. I redesigned the login page, along with all pages accessible before logging in. I added some javascript checking of the registration input fields. I also made the registration complete page match the rest of the outside pages. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Thanks again for your advice!

oh wow, well i love how you took everything out of the box...much better...and the grey gradient at the bottom coming upwards - very nice...

*logging in, *forgot password, *retrieving password

nice and simple retrieval page...

ok nothing terrible but the retrieval confirmation page is still a little dry, im thinking the same template should load telling me the same message but now having the login box showing to im ready to login right away after i check my email...

checked email, great, it came in, even into hotmail.com.

pasted link into browser and it worked great too, I get to create a new password.

I noticed the inside template is different than the homepage, me, personally, I would LOVE that new outside template all the way through MO.

Password changed, no errors.

OK so I created a blog post. I tried adding an HTML link in my post and found that once I viewed my post, the HTML was showing rather than creating a link. Most blogs out there allow you to create links in your posts, even if they add the nofollow attribute to the link tag. I think you should fix this kind sir!

Also, I then tried to navigate to my blog post from another browser where I wasn't logged in. I went to your homepage and couldn't find a way to view blog posts either so im assuming at this point that everything regarding members including blog posts is only for the eyes of members...

I would make blog posts public which would give your site a lot of public pages for the search engines to index.

so my blog post didn't really do what I wanted it to do, namely be public and able to add links to it so I deleted it and since I did take 5 minutes to write it I'm going to throw it up on my server = )



So I'm browsing around, and I checked out Hannah 's pictures, not too bad...she's got her music player, with her song list...pretty cool...

I uploaded a picture with the flash box and it worked fine.

OK so browsing around I didn't encounter any more errors. I didn't trying using the picture uploader that mentions the possibility of not working...just in case but other than that everything else seems to work fine.

My major request would be to make as much of the information public as possible or at the very least the blog and forum posts.

GREAT WORK SO FAR!

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Alright, well, it may not be pretty, but there are now public profiles and public blog posts.
Made the password retrieval match the rest of the site.
I have not yet made it so you can put html into blog posts other than bold, italics, and underline. It does have auto-linking if you put something it recognizes as a URL in the body. What I plan to do is something like bbcode, and include buttons up top to insert pictures/links/etc.
I've also been fixing some bugs with the bp IM feature.

Lemme just say thanks again for all your input, it's really helpful!

I couldn't find the public posts or profile?
I was wondering though...a lot of other social sites don't allow full profile browsing even when you're logged in. Is that what you truly want to achieve?

Maybe only a portion of the person's profile should be viewable, like if you click on one of those pictures on the right hand side, you could be brought to their profile page where you can read their blog but not contact them...something things to that effect.

So as it stands, I refreshed again and I cannot see the blog I wrote...

So I logged in...I can't find the blog but I did look around and I must say I'm impressed...OK So I found you can view a person's blog if they are your friend. Correct?

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Right now the only reason you can see all members is because there are only 120 of them.
The privacy settings when you edit your profile decide who can see what, and who can contact you or even add you as a friend. You must also specify whether your profile is to be viewable to non-members as well, also on the privacy page.
Oh, the reason you can't see the blog is because I just added the ability to make blog posts fully public. If you go to "My Blog" and click the pencil icon next to the red X on that blog entry, you can change its privacy level. The four levels are private, friends only, members only, and public.

Nice...very nice...

OK do your thing and keep us posted...

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Well, I've changed a few things. I've made the option to make public blogs/blog entries and profiles, and now you can browse the forums but not actual posts/threads. Links to all three of these features have been added to the login page. Also, I added a new feature, currently called "blabs" (couldn't decide on a name, so just said "whatever" and started coding) that also have privacy options, but are not on profiles yet. I also received an email telling me that my email validation code for the registration page was incorrect, so that has been fixed as well.