Four Sites I Can’t Live Without
When you spend as much time as I do thinking about websites you start to develop a catalog of sites in your brain. I mean, I probably see 100 sites a day on average, the majority of those are either blogs or news sites that I end up on thanks to Hacker News. For the most part they are unmemorable, and I will probably never visit them ever again. Then there are the sites that I am on every day. The ones that I love. The ones that I find myself constantly going back to and using on a regular basis. I also find myself constantly recommending their tools and services to friends, clients, and random strangers on the street.
None of these sites are small obscure sites that only a handful of brilliant visionaries are using. Rather, they are all well established, profitable companies that have found a niche (some large, some small), and are simply being the best of the best in their chosen space. While most people who read this have probably heard of or used every one of these sites the number of my friends and associates who have not constantly surprises me. Here are 4 sites I can’t live without.
1. Dropbox
Out of all of these sites these guys are probably the most famous, and with good reason. They make an incredible product, and they make it easy to use. Simply put, Dropbox allows you to backup and then access files online. This comes in damn handy when someone decides to oh, I don’t know, break into your apt. over the weekend and rip off two of your laptops (as was the case with me this past week). I was pretty panicked for a bit, but once I got a new laptop I just disconnected my old laptop from my Dropbox account and synced it to me new one. All my important contracts, images, .psd files, etc. were back on my machine, and I was back to work.
2. WooThemes
I love these guys. They build the best WordPress themes out there. Period. I’ve used several of their themes on my own sites, and have also used them to build clients’ sites as well. They are so easy to setup and use that I just automatically turn to them for any site design that isn’t going to require much proprietary work. At least once a week a friend of mine will say “Yeah, I’m thinking of redesigning my blog/website, and I’ve found a pretty good designer here in (insert city name here) who can do it for me for (insert price range of $300-$1000 here).” To which my response is always the same – “Oh my God, don’t pay someone that much money for a simple WordPress blog. Go check out WooThemes.”
3. WUFOO
While I’m on the wu’s/woo’s I might as well throw this one in there. WUFOO is another great small business that is doing one thing, and doing it extremely well. They make embeddable forms and surveys that are really easy to create, and can be added to any webpage in just a couple of minutes. I think I am currently using them on 3-4 different sites.
While my love for their product is strong, there is another reason that I love these guys (and the other Woo guys as well). They have a kick-ass business in a niche, and they aren’t trying to blow up and sell their company for hundreds of millions. They are following the 37signals way and growing a profitable company organically. They have a small team (I believe it’s 6 total), and they all work from home, and many of them from different cities. I find companies like this to be extremely motivating for myself as I work on new ideas. My goal isn’t to be Twitter, it’s to have a small profitable company that I can operate from anywhere in the world.
“I fucking hate idea people.” – Jason Fried
I don’t really consider myself an ideas person, I consider myself a “get shit done” person. I believe that those people are called Project Managers (thought I’m willing to concede that a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one). The problem is, when your startup has two people working on it and you are a “get shit done” guy, you need to either be designing your product, or building it. With this realization in mind I have been working on improving my coding chops for the past month or so. I recognize that it is a long process that will take at least a year or two for me to get to the level I want to be at, so until then there is Google App Engine.
Here’s what I love about GAE (which we built Lenguajero on). It is really easy for someone like me (limited tech background) to get it up and running quickly. It took me about 4 hours to get the python SDK installed, and to figure out the basics of how it all worked (the basic tutorial is really great). It takes away a lot of complexity for me at this early stage. I don’t need to setup a MySQL database, or worry about running an app server. It’s all handled by google, which lets me focus on the things I want to be focusing on (writing lines of python code).
In the spirit of being fair and balanced, I’ll say this. GAE has some serious drawbacks. I find that datastore to be very frustrating from time to time and having learned a lot of MySQL basics GQL frustrates the hell out of me. However, for the little coding projects that I am working on right now it more than does the trick, and allows me to learn very practically, by building webapps.
I’m curious to hear from other people about what sites they simply can’t live without. Are there any sites that you just can’t stop talking about? Let me know in the comments.
