www.freeradicals.ning.com

In general building a social network is easy, however creating a social network that's original requires much thought and planning. A social network exists to bring people together over the internet, whether that be messaging each other, creating or joining groups of interest or commenting on a picture of someone they know. These are essentially core elements that make up all social networks to date from facebook to bebo to myspace.

Having scratched away at my head whilst twiddling my thumbs for countless hours I finally had what I could only describe as an epiphany albeit a sudden realisation of what would make a fantastic place for people to congregate on the internet. Enter Free Radicals...

www.freeradicals.ning.com is all about expressing your opinion on issues that affect all of us as a people. Matters such as climate change or over population to the latest news from Africa etc. The idea is to get people talking about these issues, debate them and hopefully form a general consensus about what we can all do about them.

But wait. It goes further than that, free radicals lets you post videos, pictures and most importantly create groups in which users can use to rally people into the different topics of interest. Eventually the idea of Free Radicals would be to gain enough support from people to make it a big success and take it further. By this i mean beyond the web, for instance free radicals could be used to organise meetings where action could be taken. For example a group of campaigners could come together through free radicals and perhaps demonstrate outside the Japanese embassy in London over the whale hunting situation in the Atlantic. Who knows...?

Creating Free Radicals was a pleasure as it allowed me to harness my creative side to design a website how I would see suitable.

During the development process I became confident with using a variety of design tools that would be useful to any website designer. Having experimented with a program called gimp, i was able to design many suitable logo's for the site, however the final logo design was a result of Adobe Illustrator. The background was initially done on Illustrator but i enhanced the image on Adobe Photoshop to give it its unique look. During the development process i also experimented with Adobe Flash and expanded upon my knowledge of this program. I am currently working on a flash animation which i can place on my site to aid its visual aesthetic.