Ramblings

Visit Penn State Security and Risk Analysis Students

Yeah, so this is the SRA Social network that I spent my life's blood designing the theme for -__-. Ning is cool and everything, but using it makes my soul cry. In my professional opinion, the different features and the felxiblity of the colors and background pictures only creates the illusion of customizablity. Sure, you can change the colors around and everything, but in the end, the sample layouts are all the same design with different colors plugged in, you can only arrange the features so many different ways, and the only things that really distinguish these networks from one another visually would be if the creators incorperated uncommon widgets. Even then, widgets were difficult because the column sizes were completely ridged. You couldn't even deviate from the three column design.

Overall, it ranks better than this blogging site, but under LiveJournal and WAY under Weeble. It's good for what it is, but there's way better stuff out there. Sites definitely can be made highly customizable without an extensive knowledge of HTML, though from what I saw on Ning, not even HTML could really help.