One of the things I’ve been working on a lot lately is customizing communities, primarily through themes. I’ve been dealing mostly with Jive Software’s SBS platform (formerly Clearspace). I’ve only just delved into cyn.in though, which so far is blowing my mind.

The process is pretty seamless, but one thing I’m doing on the FG SQUARED intranet (Inside FG2, above) is making design changes on the fly in the browser with Firebug (highly recommended). I can then just copy and paste the changes into the CSS file and save it when I’m ready to go live with the updated theme. I haven’t worked this way before, but it’s really kind of cool to get immediate design feedback in context to the page and content.

Of course, there’s always good ol’ Photoshop comps. These are some proposed designs for the 2.0 Adoption Council Community (I had nothing to do with their main site, I swear):

The logo is a “Web 2.0-ized” version of the existing 2.0 Adoption Council logo. If you’re evangelizing Web 2.0, you should have a glossy Web 2.0 logo, right?

Here’s a couple of other Jive communities we’ve rolled out, both for PGI:

Both of those communities are live. PGiConnect went live in October of 2008. That community has been very successful. That was the first community theme I was a part of and it was hellishly confusing. Getting it IE6-friendly was not an easy task. PGiLife is relatively new. It’s an internal community for PGi and I was only part of the design consult and implementation. I’m currently working on several communities for Motorola, as they have adopted Jive SBS as their community platform across all business units and there is a ton of migration that needs to happen.

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