Rate my startup: Make stupid simple websites for work, play and life. (opens in new tab)

Please let us know what you think about our startup.

It's the best of a wiki, a website builder and a book.

We built this in response to our own needs. We needed a way to collaborate and publish but wikis weren't working for us. They were easy, but not easy enough and they are typically too ugly to use as a primary website.

The key innovations for us were:

Snap Editor: Click anywhere on the page and you edit in place. The page "snaps" around the text to let you know that you can edit. Drop dead stupid easy. Table of Contents: In wikis, you end up with orphan pages. In normal website navigation, you are usually limited to only around 5 pages before it gets messy. The table of contents on the right makes sure you never lose a page and that you can organize up to 1000 pages. It is drag and drop all the time.

Site Decorator: Wikis (and many website builders) are ugly. We built a template designer that we know works because even our developers were making good-looking websites.

One thing we aren't sure of is how to sell our product. Is it a new type of wiki? Is it a simple website builder? Curious what you guys think.

REALLY well done. I'm very impressed-- one of the slicker edit implementations I've seen in a while! I hope it's a fun project rather than a business effort, though-- seems like competing with Posterous, WordPress, Weebly, and a bajillion other site builders/editors out there is going to be awfully hard when the going rate for such things is free (read: get funded or shift to a business market ASAP).

Apps like this have a reasonable viral loop (i.e. view a site built on it, see a button that says, "get your own Orb in 15 seconds!")... But if that's wildly successful, how exactly do you make money?

A couple critiques for the front page:

- Change the wording on your "Call to Action" button. The fact that you can jump right in and start editing without filling out a form is great -- emphasize it, don't hide it. Saying "Sign up, it's free" makes me think I'm going to be filling out a form, creating a username, giving out my email, etc. It should just say "Try it now for free" or "Jump right in" or something along those lines.

- The screenshots of example sites should most decidedly either open up larger, or open to the actual live sites on which those screenshots were taken. If I knew better what the button did (see above) I might not have cared as much, but I always like to see what the creators consider some "ideal end results" with their product. A tiny thumbnail is just not going to cut it in that regard.

EDIT: Okay, going back, I see now the button actually says "Start Now, it's Free". I don't know why I thought it said "Sign Up", but I guess if nothing else it's worth noting that an actual "user" went to your site and misread the button. I don't know if that means it still needs to be changed, but at any rate, it happened. :-)

Really awesome site, I hope it does well.

However, after signing up your welcome email contained my password in plain text. Which probably means you are storing it in plain text. Please consider doing a one way hash on it for better security.

In the Dev channel of Chrome (windows 7), 7.0.517.5, I had a really frustrating experience where it says "Click here to edit this page." and I just kept clicking and clicking, feeling like I was missing something? And it just wouldn't work.

Popped open Firefox (latest on windows 7) all worked beautifully, and I'd like to echo that the site looks great! I'm also running Vimium as an extension in Crhome, so possible conflict? Dunno.

You guys are competing in a really tight space (weebly, posterous), so kudos and good luck. The design is top notch.

I worked on the Page Creator Team at Google (WYSIWYG website editor that launched 4 or 5 years ago, and was eventually subsumed into Sites). It's cool to see how much better the technology is than it was back then (we literally had to build a different editor for every browser, since contenteditable only existed in IE, and there was no such thing as Mootools or JQuery)

Your site is pretty cool. The table of contents feature is nice (we had a lot of requests for that). I wouldn't worry about large sites, because you are going to have to optimize for some use case.

One thing we found was that a lot of people didn't actually know what to put on their site. Templates are probably a good way to do this. Another possibility would be to have different entry pages for different use cases (bring people in when they search for "I want a way to do X").

If you want an example of a company that has been successful in this market, take a look at SquareSpace (they were profitable on their own, and just took a monster VC round).

You guys own orbs.com? Wow, how much did that run ya?

When glancing at a site like this, I'll give it 5 minutes. Usually the 5 minutes are spent reading headings/paragraphs, watching an intro video, checking pricing / features.

But in this case, I spent the 5 minutes actually using the product. (because that's ALL you can do!)... (which is good)

I like that you don't have to create an account - I was able to get in and start building a site in less than a minute.

I also liked the "Text Style" and "Color Set" pickers. (I like that they're combinations of heading/paragraph styles, instead of having to choose them separately).

I also like that you don't have a bunch of different layouts too choose from. Picking a header image should be enough for most users to start with.

Very impressive!

I like the frontpage, I wish everything was this easy.

Couple of suggestions:

In design:

Customized is the top item, but I don't have any customized layouts (nor is there a hint how to make one).

The layout editor is confusing. I don't see what is the difference between bars and banners, etc. Eventually I figure out these are the categories of the layout, and not particular parts of the page I am going to design.

The names are still not very clear to me, seems like the categories should be named after the banner image: something like nature, business, buildings, sport, etc.

It turns the customised design editor is actually very cool. I'd like to be able to resize the images though, and delete them - the theme I was editing had three banners images (the 'money' theme), and I wanted to get rid of the extra two.

The color set with the black background wasn't working for me (using Chrome).

In the editor:

Inserting a url, when I select the text and insert a link the text becomes the caption - but if I choose one of my own pages the caption text gets replaced with the name of the page. It doesn't look like I change it either (without using the html editor).

In settings:

Why does my username have to be six characters long? I'm quite attached to 'sjf'

Settings, privacy and invites look great, very simple. As an un-privileged viewer I can still see the design and settings links even though they don't do anything. This is frustrating.

Hope it works out for you guys. I share your frustration with wikis, they are so ugly.

I like that I'm thrown immediately into the interface. I don't have to "just sign-up, it's free" to try it out. Signing up for something means giving someone else my e-mail, verifying the e-mail, logging back in... all of this just to see how something works, when in all likelihood, I won't touch it again.

This though, this is a good idea. I've already made the website, and I'd have to sign up if I wanted to save it. I have something invested in it; it's now worth my time to save the site.

It's intuitive, easy, and useful. You guys have a good shot at survival.

WTF why on earth did you limit usernames to between 6 and 12 characters???

My first impressions were super favorable, but when you prevented me from using either obie or obiefernandez (my preferred usernames) for no good reason it totally killed my enthusiasm. Stopped me dead in my tracks. :(

Wow, very slick. Will keep this in mind next time I need to set up a quick website.

One issue -- the "forgot your password" didn't work when I used my username, had to use my email address.

Also, after I registered, my password was emailed to me in clear text which I generally don't like -- I get uncomfortable when I see my password (and who might be sitting next to me when I check my mail?). Although since the site doesn't use SSL I guess should be using a throwaway one anyway.

Really nice.

I love the image tool. Super easy to use and looks great. The slider to resize the image is great. A lot of tools like this default to type in boxes for pixel dimensions. In most cases exact pixel sizing just doesn't matter. With your tool I can just drag the slider until it looks right. Any chance of getting some image library functionality so I can browse the images that I have previously uploaded. Not strictly necessary, I could just upload again, but it could be a nice feature.

One small complaint. The behavior of the Add a Link, Add a Table, and Add an Image buttons seems inconsistant. They all have the little down arrow which to me indicates that a menu will drop down with some options. The Add a Table button performs exactly as I expected, but the Add a Link and Add an Image buttons cause a "dialog box" to popup. Using the dialog box is fine in general, but because of the down arrows I am expecting a menu and it is a little jarring.

A little detail: the home page title is "Home", does not look good in the browser and is bad for SEO.

For the rest it's a really awesome website.

Looks like the freemium model for web hosting/construction. I have to agree with some other comments stating the staring templates are needed. People new to site construction will see the blank sites as too much, like when you give someone 25 choices to buy jams, they don't buy any. But if you give them 5 choices of jam, they are more likely to buy something.

Guide their design process a bit and they will grow their Orbs enough for it to really take shape.

How are you dealing with the potential of spammers? Watching and will worry about it when it happens? Or something else?

Got an idea in a similar space but been wondering how I could effectively deal with bots, etc. I have a variety of techniques on forums/comment sites dealing with spam but none are perfect and some still gets through (usually manual operators rather than bots).

Great domain name. How did you get it?

Minor nitpick: I couldn't get out of editing a block of text. I'd hit cancel, it would pop up a confirm saying "save or cancel", I'd hit cancel. It would drop me back into the editor.

That happened 3 times in a row and I was about to leave and never come back to your broken site. Then I noticed the tiny little "actually cancel" link down at the bottom of that confirmation box.

So my suggestion is to fix your save/cancel confirm box to work like everybody else's. You'll confuse a lot less people.

While you're at it, grey out the rest of the page while it's visible. It pops up down below the content you're editing, and it's easy to miss it and wonder why the first cancel button is not doing anything. And of course, it has the same button names on it, leading one to expect to be able to click the first cancel button a second time (since you're already hovering over it) to accomplish the same thing.

Suggestion: Provide the user with starting templates based on their goals e.g. blank, wedding, blog, Company Information...

There templates will contain a default theme and the structure inside, which I could use as a guide when editing.

In any case, fantastic site! I'll try and do my wedding site with it.

I'd pay $5/year for CNAME support + export content feature.

I like it.

One suggestion: on the "name your site" page tell people the rules for site names. I first tried a number and got told it had to start with a letter. Then after my second attempt I was told it had to be at least 6 letters. Third time lucky.

I think many of the use cases you list on the front page are a bit of a stretch. The To Do list for example, there's already hundreds of different ways people keep their to do lists, and I can't see any advantage of keeping one here over my own way. You might want to consider distilling down the use cases to a handful if not one or two very strong use cases and focus on those. It's much harder to market to everyone rather than specific user types. If you try to speak to everyone, the message gets very watered down, but if you try to speak to one specific user type, i.e. Moms, the message is direct and relevant.

have you heard of http://www.squarespace.com/? They have the same pitch: build a site, no programming required... They have a good model for income..

Unless I'm missing something, this needs an obvious hook of why it's easier, right up front. I see a number of attractive screenshots, but nothing to excite a user into "Wow! This is simple!". I mean, everyone says their software is simple. You're going to have to show, not tell, right on the front page.

Your audience is nontechnical users, and I think there may be a bigger hurdle there to get them to "click on the big green button". At least a better screenshot maybe? I can see it's supposed to show editing I think but it's not clear.

Cool editor -- definitely consider making it licensable.

A minor quibble: when I create a table it would be nice if 'tab' moved between cells as in Word/Excel rather than adding a tab within the cell.

Well done, probably the best implementation of a simple site builder I've seen.

Only issue I found was the template picker has body content "This is where your content will be.". Granted its quite an easy change but a repeated sentence like that doesn't quite show off what the template would look like with actual paragraph text (not all equally sized and spaced).

Lorem ipsum does a fair bit better job at this, but since the text will be user facing I'd suggest writing up some decent sample text, perhaps a story about orbs.com?

The no-signup functionality is nice.

Your tagline is wrapping in a way you probably don't want (osx/firefox):

http://imgur.com/PKOyC.png

This is exciting. If you can get groups of people to collaborate on topics of shared interest then you could build dedicated pages ("information hubs"?) for every conceivable topic, sort of like wikipedia, only better. Then advertising would pay the bills (and probably very well) because those hubs would be linked to often and come up frequently in searches. To build momentum you could crowd-source by offering users a cut of the advertising revenue depending on their level of contribution.

I impressed by how easy it is to use. Perfect for Church moms organizing themselves.

I don't like how it's sending my password back to me in plaintext when I register, though.

Nice job, as soon as I clicked the "start now button" orbs exceeded my expectations thanks to the wysiwyg type editor.

Couple thoughts: 1. Where can customers submit feedback, get support, make feature requests, etc.? That's priority #1 2. Any thoughts on how can you get the word out, I'd stop building new features and focus on the viral component.

Very impressed, been looking for something like this for a couple of weeks. Are you planning on adding 'comments' functionality.

I am looking for better support for right to left languages. I use Google's transliterate bookmarklets to enter text, which sort of works OK, but then somehow the text box flips the orientation and the punctuations go to the wrong side. This might be a low on your priority right now, but its something I'd be interested in.

This is great. I see one immediate problem with group collaboration that sort of makes me not want to use the site -- I have to recruit all my friends and convince them to keep adding to the site. Is there some sort of feedback loop to encourage contribution and maintain content so I don't have to do that myself?

Well done! 2 things:

- make all images on the landing page clickable, maybe link them to an example that uses that design. I clicked and nothing happened.

- don't show the "delete" or "rename" menu item on the "Home" page, when you can't use them anyways.

I wish the site had a nice Features Area, so I could get an overview of what the product will do without actually signing up for it. I bet you'll lose some legitimate customers who would rather read about the product before making a "purchase" decision.

One little thing, in the Design tab on the left it looks like all the closed arrows are open and the one open section is a closed arrow. (All the closed ones are pointing down and the open one is pointing right). Safari 5 on Snow Leopard.

It's very neat. I had a minor issues with changing text formatting. I would make sure they're smooth.

Also the UI updates are mildly slow, e.g. when you press enter for a new line. Could make that a bit simpler/faster.

I would love to be able to give this toolset to people in PR and Corporate Communications. The ability to edit a static, professional looking site as easily as updating a blog would be a huge benefit for them.

I was really expecting to see some links to sample sites on the front page, rather than just thumbnails.

I refused to sign up just to see what they looked like.

Well done! Incredibly intuitive. The image add/text alignment is great and html editing to boot. Can you tell if many users have added google analytics?

This is really slick! Great job in terms of design, UI, responsiveness, etc.

Dunno how it looks as a business, but it's a slick product for sure.

The edit on clicking doesnt work with Firefox 4 beta (I am on Windows 7). It works on the regular firefox 3.6.9 though.

I don't understand it: why does it mention things like todo lists or trip organizers, when it is just a web editor?

I couldn't find a way to move the table of contents to the left side. Is that possible?

I'm sorry, I don't like it. The editing interface is way confusing and cluttered. Sorry.

Looks great! I'd like to see some demo orbs to see what's possible with the editor.

I would spell coordination (as in project coordination) without a dash.

Will it be possible to design a template from scratch in html?

The site is blocked by my MegaCorp's proxy. (No reason given.)

Accessing from my phone I really like the site, just thought you should be aware that you've made it to someone's blacklist.

Is there a Twitter account to follow updates?

I'd be nice to have a little demo video.

trying it out right now.

How do you share once I make it private? it wasn't obvious to me.

check https://jottit.com/

What did you write it in?

Very very slick.

a screencast of the app would nice

very slick

Cool site. I'm super experienced in CMS type things like this, having done work for local businesses in the past.

Here's some competitors you might not know about:

www.webstarts.com - They let you drag and drop to make designs, which is great, and have more features than anyone. They also try to bilk you horribly with worthless addons. Check these guys out for ideas, maybe make a free website. With design skills you can make an amazing website with this, most people don't though.

www.sitekreator.com - An expensive ($10 monthly) site creator with many features.