When our product managers and engineers prepare to roll out a new feature for the Ning Platform, it’s the Ning advocacy department’s job to document the nitty-gritty details. We dive in and quiz everyone involved about nearly every detail of the upcoming product release. We take the answers to our many “okay-but-can-it-do-this” questions and marry it to the wealth of content that lives on our internal wiki. We combine it all — from first spec to wireframes to release notes — to create articles for our knowledgebase; a.k.a., the “Help Center.”

This is the fourth incarnation of the Ning Help Center. The previous Help Center has served us very well — and for a long time. For the past three or four years, it’s been a highly trafficked site visited by tens of thousands of Network Creators each month. The previous Help Center had an understated elegance to the design that encouraged customers to search and find what they needed. Over time, though, the content in the knowledgebase grew. Finding helpful articles through search wasn’t enough. This has been especially true for brand-new Network Creators, who have often requested a way to browse content based on their skill level. First-timers, in particular, are better served by introductory videos, a list of Top 10 Newbie Questions, and a downloadable PDF launch plan. They need guidance and friendly advice more than they need to find out if the new Chat lets you block out swear words. (BTW: It does!)

Here are a few of the high-level goals that guided the Help Center redesign:

Make it more friendly

First and foremost, we wanted to make the home page and everything that sits beneath it much more visual. We needed visual cues, FAQ lists for complex articles, asides and tips, the ability to put different types of content on a page, etc. It needs to reflect the always-changing document it actually is, and it should have the personality and “Ning Voice” that we’ve always cultivated in our Creators community and elsewhere.

Better navigation, better organization

We absolutely knew customers would enjoy more options for discovering content, and we definitely wanted a step up from asking customers to search and find. We created an understandable top navigation scheme; an always-available feature list for drilling down by feature; quick access to our often-used troubleshooting articles; exposed tags for those who use them; inviting landing pages for special topics; an attractive home-page slider with revolving content that can easily be changed to announce new product releases; and much more. Most important: We now have the flexibility to change all of this as needed.

Consolidate our content

We took this opportunity to unify our popular Best Practices articles, Inspiration gallery, and Getting Started guide under one umbrella. Previously, this content was distributed in different locations. Now, nearly everything that isn’t part of the Creators Community is located in the Help Center. Long-time Network Creators may have seen some of this additional content, but now it’s all in one place for everyone to access.

Unleash our advocates’ expertise

Our old system was a bit of a bear for us to update, so we wanted to make it incredibly easy for every Ning advocate to jump in and make a quick change on the fly. Further, we want to encourage our advocates to get creative and really share their expertise. They speak to customers every day, and we want to give them more power to immediately add new content to the Help Center based on specific feedback from our customers.

Those were a few of our main goals, and we think we’ve got a great start on making the Help Center more friendly and usable. Take a look at the old and new home pages, side-by-side:

And, take a gander at one of our most popular articles, which covers the complex task of setting up a custom domain:

It’s a marked improvement. Of course, this migration to a new Help Center is just a beginning and not the end. We still have more to create. Now that all of our advocates can get in there and add new content, here’s a few more things we may be doing going forward:

• Add more examples of super-succesful networks to the Inspiration gallery and divide it into deeper categories (e.g., education, business, craft niches, etc.). Sometimes, people like to just browse through other networks to see how other people do things.
• Incorporate some of the best tips from the Creators Network into the Help Center. Every Friday afternoon, we send out a newsletter to all members of the Creators Network that includes the top tips of the week from the community. This is the type of content we think can be graduated to the Help Center so everyone can reap the benefits of these excellent shared tips.
• Our screencasts have always been well-received, and we’d like to create new ones for more complex topics like adding a custom header, fooling around with CSS, or setting up Google Webmaster tools. Screencasts are time-intensive to create, but by watching closely how people use the new Help Center, we can surely identify spots where a video walk-through would be useful.
• Include articles about using outside tools like Google Alerts, Firebug, free online image editors, outside polling services, etc.; anything we can “review” for you and show you how third-party tools can be easily used in conjunction with your Ning Network.
• Provide ready-made content for Network Creators to take and use like a “Welcome Center” or “About Us” HTML page; Broadcast Message templates you can copy and paste; and perhaps a Mini Help Center for your own network that’s as brand-free as possible and that covers the basics for your members; things like that which can make creating content easier for you.

Those are just a few of the ideas we have for this next generation of the Help Center. Feel free to let us know your thoughts and feedback, particularly about how those last few things should work — or whatever else you think would help you find and get information you need to help you build and grow your Ning Network.

Health and fitness sites are nothing new, but finding a place that motivates and connects us to others with the same fitness goals is something of a foreign concept for many people. After all, we can’t all be on the The Biggest Loser and who wants to publicly share their weight loss goals?

The beauty is that people naturally feel more comfortable sharing this type of thing with like-minded people around them. We see this extending to the online world. In many ways, Ning Communities serve as the social lubricant, getting people to open up and share their story — for support, motivation and to highlight their successes to encourage others. With that in mind, we wanted to point out a few Ning communities making an impact on people’s health:

Move Nourish Believe

iAmTRI

Runners For Life

Strength Performance Network

Adelaide Cyclists

Russian Kettlebells UK – Helping Fellow Kettlebellers Come Together. Learn, Connect and Grow.

30 Bananas a Day!

NJ Hiking: Connect – A Social Network for New Jersey Hiking Enthusiasts

www.DiscGolfersR.Us – The Community of Disc Golfers and About All Things Disc Golf

Richmond Road Runners – Supporting running in the metro Richmond area

Outdoor Baby Network – An information sharing site for families who enjoy the outdoors!

Whether you’re trying to lose weight, bulk up, or simply interested in mixing up your dietary habits, there’s likely a Ning community filled with people aspiring to achieve the same results as you. And if there’s not, create your own community today and you can help improve the lives and health for thousands of people out there seeking the same fitness and health goals as yourself.

Beach-goers worldwide will thank you.

To find a Ning site for your mom, head to Google and type in the hobby or interest you’d like to find, and add “site:ning.com” to the end of the search. This will search content and topics from Ning communities. For instance, here’s a Google search result for skiing — each result is a Ning community. We also highlight a lot of great Ning sites through our blog, the Ning Resource Center, Customer Spotlight and Inspiration pages.

Better yet, if the Ning site she joins has social sign-in enabled, she’ll be able to use her social identity from services like Facebook, Yahoo!, Google and Windows Live to sign up and sign-in, meaning 1 less screen name or password for her to remember or write down.

Here are a few Ning communities Mom might like:

The arts
My Modern Metropolis
MyGraficO Arts & Crafts Community
The Crafter’s Cafe – A place for women to come together, support one another, and build friendships
crafthaus – PARTICIPATORY SPORT FOR CRAFT ARTISTS
Knitting Community
The Peachy Keen Connection
The Cookery Network – The place for passionate cooks

Travel
The Hive

Celebrity
Smart Girls at the Party – CHANGE THE WORLD BY BEING YOURSELF
moonfrye

Causes
Navy For Moms
Women on the Road to Rio20

Working moms & mompreneurs
Professional Leaders of Women and Girls – Providing Quality Products, Services, and Support
Role Mommy
Pregnant Bloggers Club – Where pregnant bloggers converge
Executive Moms
Women Advisors Forum

Local communities
Chippewa Valley Moms – A Local Resource For Moms
ParentingNH – Events, features and things to do for families in NH
santarosamom – Conversation, ideas and events for parents in Santa Rosa and Sonoma County
Spartanburg Moms – A gathering place for moms in Upstate South Carolina
Des Moines Families – The 411 on 515.

Health & family
Babble Playground
National Movement for America’s Children – The Time to Awaken is Now.

Why else would you want to find a community for your mom? Hint, it benefits you…

It wasn’t so long ago that Facebook was only available to college students. But how times have changed. If you’ve tempted online fate by accepting a Facebook friend request from your parents, you know the online run-ins that can inevitably happen. Choice examples include awkward comments made by your dad for a party photo posted by your friends, or that check-in you didn’t get the chance to de-tag before your mom wondered what you were doing out at 4 AM. Find your mom a Ning site that’ll excite and get her engaged, and you might find a bit of refuge for your Facebook account.

Does your mom want a place to share family photos or does she have friends that share the same hobbies as her but aren’t sharing with each other online? Take her Mother’s Day gift 1 step further and create a Ning community for her! This is a great way to connect your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends. All in a safe and private place, too.

Better yet, make her an admin of the community so she can take ownership and pride in keeping family and friends together through her Ning site.

Happy Mothers Day, Mom!

The show brings together student works from 9 high schools within various districts, 18 teachers and their classrooms, 1,300 students, and guest galleries from additional school districts across the country.

“SMartWorkShow highlights student work from the media, entertainment, engineering, video gaming, graphic arts, digital photography and web design high school courses in several different schools in our county,” said Lauren Sneed, a school counselor for the San Mateo County Office of Education, Regional Occupational Program.

With Ning, the show is set up to allow participating teachers to upload student work directly to the site. Work is checked by the art show curators and each piece is categorized by media type so similar works can be grouped together. Many of the teachers did not know each other prior to this project, and are coming together to help organize the exhibition across the various participating schools. These teachers now share lesson plans and projects, communicate via email to solve problems, ask questions and work together with the show’s marketing team. As an offline marketing component, the teachers turned student works into postcards (pictured below) and held a design contest for its posters (pictured at bottom).

“This is the 3rd year for the show. We first proposed the concept of an online art show to help bring teachers within these pathways together and highlight their students’ work by leveraging resources and working in a supportive professional learning community,” said Sneed. “By creating the show with Ning, the focus is to promote career and technical education and merge these rigorous courses to also meet the California common core standards, utilizing 21st century skills in hopes of providing students with information about viable careers.”

As a Bay Area-based company, we’re really excited to see a local school district using our technology to enrich students’ lives by promoting proficiency in technology. The show is available through September 21 and you can check it out through their Ning community here.

Clockwise from the top: Ning‘s Jason Rand attended an April meeting with San Mateo county teachers to prepare for the SMartwork Online Art Show. Lauren Sneed helped to organize the SMartwork Online Art Show. A SMartwork Online Art Show poster made with students’ works. A screenshot of the digital photography gallery for the SMartwork Online Art Show.

Ning has become known as a flexible, powerful social platform. Within minutes, anyone can create an online community that’s completely custom. A wide range of individuals, organizations and companies depend on Ning to bring people together – right down to the smallest groups that may only have a few dozen members.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Ning Creators take the platform to a whole new level. Many successful communities with big audiences are generating significant revenue. Others use Ning as a co-publishing platform to fuel social conversations for their brand and products. These customers are demanding more from Ning. They need to be confident that their network won’t go down. And, if something serious does happen, they need to know Ning will respond quickly, even at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning. They need an account manager who understands their objectives, the progress they’ve made with their network and the challenges they face – someone who can provide a high level of service and advice. They also need deeper metrics to understand how members are interacting on their network and sharing content on the social web.  And, they need professional design services so they can launch a community that communicates their brand and values.

We frequently receive inquiries for this higher level of service and premium SLA (service level agreement) from prospective customers as well. Up until now, we haven’t offered a subscription plan or a dedicated team who can address these needs. In several cases, we’ve negotiated a special deal and tasked a number of internal support and engineering resources to deliver this special treatment. With others, the customer either purchased a Ning Pro subscription or we lost out on their business.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of the Ning VIP Plan:

• Guaranteed uptime
• Point-in-time recovery back-ups
• 24/7 IT support for urgent issues
• A dedicated account manager
• Monthly social engagement reporting
• Launch consultation and training
• Professional design and development
• 1 Terabyte of storage and 10 Terabytes per month of bandwidth

Due to the location and time zone of our VIP account managers, we can initially only deliver the VIP Plan to customers in the U.S., Canada and Germany. If you’re interested in the new Ning VIP plan, please give us a call at 1-866-992-0971 (U.S. and Canada) or 0800-101-4903 (Germany).

Let Members Join with LinkedIn and Windows Live

We’ve heard a lot of requests from Network Creators who want additional sign-up/sign-in options. You’ll be happy to hear that Social Sign In now includes both LinkedIn and Windows Live, which will be great news for business-focused networks and many international networks (e.g., Windows Live is huge in Brazil). The set-up for these will be very similar to Facebook and Twitter options; as the Network Creator, you’ll need to create an app for this purpose by entering your own LinkedIn or WindowsLive credentials.

Ready to create yours? Here are the Help Center articles for LinkedIn and for Windows Live.

Sign-up redirection

Want to send new members somewhere besides the Main Page — where they currently land after signing up? This is another request we’ve heard over time — to be able to redirect members to their own profile page or to a very specific page that a Network Creator has created to serve as a welcome landing page. Now, Ning Plus and Pro Network Creators have the option to send new members to either the Main Page, their own profile page (MyPage), or a custom URL.

This custom URL can be an external URL if you need to integrate your network with another web property. For example, Pro networks may want to send new members to an external web application that makes use of the Ning API to retrieve that new member’s information and register them before sending them back to the network.

We hope this will give you a few added options for customization of your new-member experience. Check out this Help Center article about these new redirection options for all the details.

Mix, match or remove sign-up / sign-in

You will now see that your options for sign up and sign in are split, and that “native” network sign in and sign up are included as options. This will allow you to turn off specific services for new members while allowing existing members to continue to sign in to the network, or to do things like limit all new members to Facebook or LinkedIn if it better matches your network’s theme and aims, or if you’d like your members to be a little less anonymous than they otherwise could be.

There’s an additional option here, one that won’t appeal to most Network Creators but that can be powerful for sites that are, for example, less about socializing and more about publishing. That option is to completely remove all sign-ups. If you make this choice, all invite options will be removed and no new members will be able to sign up. This might be an attractive choice if your network is focused on publishing, for example, and not social networking.

Want the full skinny on this new sign-up/sign-in split? Read all about it in this Help Center article.

Baseball.net made its debut as this season got started. Though the site is a rookie in terms of tenure on Ning, they’ve scored an A-list custom domain name. According to Arbel Arif, owner of Baseball.net, they built their site to support a “vast community of baseball enthusiasts who gather to ‘talk baseball’.” We’re looking forward to following their growth as the season progresses.

Opposite Baseball.net, The World Baseball Network and CheckSwing have been using Ning for 3+ years, amassing nearly 9,000 members and aspiring baseball players.

On Netflix Movie Fans, the community answers the question “What are some of your favorite baseball movies” (A League of Their Own or The Sandlot, anyone?):

For sports memorabilia collectors, the Sports Collectors Social Network provides a taste of retail therapy. The Ning community connects like-minded collectors, and provides useful tools to help in their search for elusive and rare baseball cards and other must-have goodies.

On MyTown Colorado, community member Alyson Miller recently publicized an event inviting children from all around Boulder County to gather to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and be recorded for the soundtrack of Labragirl Pictures’ film 6-4-3. The title refers to how a double play happens between players on the field: six is the shortstop, 4 is the second baseman and 3 is the first baseman.

The Hawai’i Chamber of Commerce of Northern California is using their Ning site to bring together members and non-members of the organization to a real-world meet-up for an upcoming San Francisco Giants game against the Milwaukee Brewers on May 4. They’ll be rooting for Tim Lincecum and Brian Wilson, for sure!

Meanwhile, as anyone who’s played on a club sports team knows, having a great looking uniform adds to team morale and pride. San Francisco-based Fog City Athletics & Apparel is a company specializing in athletic team uniforms and casual wear, ensuring teams are looking sharp. Their site lives on Ning, where they show their portfolio of custom print graphics and designs available for creation. From their site, they recently Tweeted a shot of custom designed baseball caps made by the company. Lookin’ good, guys!

In the same vein, members of the Kreg Jig Owners Community are learning how to build a baseball storage center with their Kreg tools to organize the likes of little league gear:

From spectating and playing, collecting memorabilia, and making apparel and equipment accessories, bringing a community together to highlight the love of baseball is a home run on Ning.

We would like to thank the team that identified the vulnerability and collaborated with us to fix it. We take privacy and security very seriously at Ning. We would again like to emphasize that due to the confidential way we were approached, no user accounts have been maliciously compromised.

Everyday, there’s billions of happenings around the world, spanning momentous occasions like the birth of a child or the start of a new job, or seemingly insignificant chores like walking the dog and taking out the trash. But how do you tell the world’s stories, through the world’s eyes?

It’s a challenge that Kyle Ruddick and Brandon Litman are tackling and showing through their film project, One Day on Earth. The film is making its worldwide premier on Earth Day, this Sunday, April 22, 2012.

The 2 filmmakers have amassed 3,000 hours of video footage captured and added by members and supporters of their site and Ning community, aptly called One Day on Earth. And the footage was, fittingly, captured during 1 day on earth: October 10, 2010 (10.10.10).

On Sunday, the film’s premier will recognize the worldwide collaboration and shared vision of thousands of people, from every country in the world, and we couldn’t be more excited to see One Day on Earth, and Ning’s impact in telling the world’s story through this film. Many of us from Ning will be attending the San Francisco screening of One Day on Earth. We’d love to see you there, or hope you can make it to a screening location worldwide.

Simon Cantlon is on a mission to document the power and allure of the American open road. And he’s using Ning as the community hub for the project. He’s producing an interactive documentary film and book called The Motels of Route 66. The project will explore the stories of the motel owners, the architecture, the travelers and the road itself, which runs between Los Angeles and Chicago.

For funding and publicity, he’s built a Ning community centered around the project and ties it closely together with his Kickstarter project, a funding platform for creative projects. By June 9, he’s looking for $30,000 in backing for the project. The funding will cover the month-long journey down Route 66 with a full four-man film crew (director, cameraman, photographer, lighting & sound), vehicle rental, equipment, gas, food, lodging and supplies.

It’s an ambitious goal, for sure, and we’re excited to follow Simon and his crew on their documentary-road trip across one of America’s most historic thoroughfares.

“We’ll be out on the road meeting travelers, the people who live in the towns, mom and pop businesses and the owners of the motels along the way, all the way down Route 66. We’ll be bringing them into the story, and letting them be a part of it. As the story unfolds step by step, it will be documented on our Ning community,” said Cantlon. “That’s awesome.”

You can back his project on his Kickstarter page and follow the endeavor through his Ning community, The Motels of Route 66.