Social Network Website evaluation

Our aim was to create an online social networking site, like facebook or ning.
I began this project by researching social networks and noted down the ones I liked, then I brainstormed ideas for my own network. A few ideas that I had was a art network, like ‘deviant art’ and ‘behance network’. And a gaming network.
I preferred the art and design network as I could incorporate my design work, also there are a lot of these social networks on the web that I could use as research and influences.

I began by making an ERD diagram, I had 4 tables. ‘member’, ‘image’, ‘url’ and ‘comment.’ After this I began drawing ideas for the 4 pages, which I then imported onto Dream weaver.

Then using previous PHP codes and seminar work I tried incorporating them into my design. But struggled as the codes I had were a bit complex and the work I did in class I found hard to use in my work.

I found this project very difficult as PHP is hard to learn. But after a bit of help from tutors and the ‘PHP academy’ tutorials on you tube I learnt quite a bit, such as variables and displaying information using PHP. Learning all the basics such as the echo and GET commands seperatley instead of having all the code I found easier to learn and make things.
If I were to continue this project I would improve the appearance by using more imagery, and adding more complex PHP. I wanted to be able to show separate profile pages of user’s but didn’t know how and ran out of time.