With very little attention paid to monitoring a site’s content or users—except in the case of major criminal offenders—visitors have virtually no way to ensure that graphic imagery or obscene language won’t pop up in advertising or profiles with every click of the mouse. And parents have no way to know whether their children’s social site of choice comes anywhere near family friendly … until now.

Launched in December 2006, ShoutLife is a Christian owned and operated social networking Web site designed to be “easy to use, visually appealing, and family friendly,” according to Paul McLellan, president and co-founder of the Minneapolis-based company.

Similar to many other blogging and online community Web sites, ShoutLife offers users a full range of features including customizable profiles, personal blogs, topical group message boards, private messaging and unlimited photo uploads. The difference is all this user-generated content is monitored 24/7 by ShoutLife in various ways.

Every photo that is uploaded to the site is “human eye verified” before being posted to the live site. A language filter takes out any objectionable terms and words entered by users, and a network of people constantly monitor profiles for content that violates the sites terms and conditions, according to Steve McLellan, director of operations.

“Of course, when you take a stance, people will always test it, but our software is quite good at catching policy violations,” Paul McLellan said. “We also provide a ‘report this page’ button on every profile so our community can assist us in monitoring our content.”

“Like the other sites out there, ShoutLife.com has all of the social networking features that people enjoy in other sites and more, but without the concern of being spammed with questionable advertising,” Steve McLellan said.

Currently, ShoutLife has 70,000 active user accountants and receives around 150,000 unique visits per month. ShoutLife advertising is sold through a faith-based agency in California to help ensure the content of the site’s ads fit with the family friendly theme.

Similar to MySpace, ShoutLife features an ever-growing network of musicians and performers. Christian recording artists like Michael W. Smith, Bob Carlisle, Stryper and Kevin Max (of dcTalk) are just a few of the 5,000 music artists using the site to connect with their fans.

“By having direct access to these musicians, fans can catch their latest news, hear new streaming audio, and communicate with other fans across the world,” Paul McLellan said. “We believe the music artists will appreciate a forum for posting news, songs, photos and blogs for their fans in an environment where they are not bombarded with content that doesn’t meet their moral standards.”

“When I first heard about ShoutLife.com, I was so happy to hear of an alternative to the other sites out there,” said Michael Sweet, solo recording artists and frontman for the rock band Stryper. “ShoutLife.com is a place for people to express themselves and interact, yet at the same time, do so in a clean environment. My only complaint is that it wasn’t around sooner.”

Steve and Paul McLellan, along with the site’s other co-founders, Hauns Froehlingsdorf and Steve Schletty, also designed the site to benefit Christian organizations of various forms.

Organizations can create profiles that individual site users can sign up to join. The organization can utilize the ShoutLife “groups” feature for their specific church, youth group or ministry.

“They can virtually create their own customized Web site and connect with all of their members. We also provide intuitive tools so they can reach an entirely new audience,” Paul McLellan said.

The development team at ShoutLife is committed to be on the cutting edge of technology with new site features added all the time.

Paul McLellan even moderates a user group discussion on ways to improve the site.

“The response [to ShoutLife] has been fantastic. We have far exceeded our goals for the first year,” Paul McLellan said. “We have invested a lot of time and money into a product that we felt the Web needed, and the response has shown us that people agree. We are just happy to be doing what we love.”

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For more information, visit www.shoutlife.com.