Firedog launches sparkling social networking portal

London’s largest and most successful event promoter, Nick House Entertainment Group (NHE), recently appointed Firedog to design and build a new Web 2.0 social networking portal for their www.londonparties.co.uk brand.

Firedog was responsible for designing the original portal which first introduced the concept of social networking to the UK nightclub sector in March 2006. (Firedog was also responsible for designing their branding in 2005).

The NHE Group commissioned Firedog in May to design and build a replacement Web 2.0 portal which needed to offer bells and whistles functionality one could typically expect from a social networking portal developed by the slick LP brand.

So how did we approach it?

We felt that new portal needed to offer extremely sexy functionality but it needed to be functional and something their members would be comfortable using.

Firedog’s strategic consultancy extended to the portal logic and the inclusion of revenue generation opportunities within the portal (ad serving & image purchase).

Whilst scoping and researching trends in the social networking sector we made the decision that LP could not improve certain functionalities offered by certain brands such as YouTube and FaceBook so we decided to link to these functions via API links.

The new site is designed with a relatively low page load, so as to make the browsing experience fast. With the re-design, we wanted to create a functional site that had a sleek, glossy, aspirational feel – a site which users would want to come back to time and time again to effectively relive their offline LP experiences online the next day…

Firedog deliverables included:

• Web strategy / objective setting
• Portal architecture
• Wireframes
• Front-end design
• Build, QA & database integration & deployment

Some key functionality highlights we’ve built into the new portal include:

• Friends with benefits (a marketplace for trading)
• Profile activity index (who’s active and just how active have they been?)
• My promo (promote yourself, your band, your event etc.)
• Upload videos (links to YouTube offering your own video on profile page)
• Who’s going where and when facility

Targets for registered membership will be 500K plus within 6 months from launch.

Watch this space!