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.
Actually, we already have custom ___domain support built in but we turned off the upgrade feature for now while we figure out pricing. It works though as you can see on this site: http://mominvancouver.com/
late reply I know, something along the lines of what 37signals offer for their pages api (backpack) would be great!
Generally just the ability to post a page - ability to hack up an offline system/ personal backups would be nice!
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?
1. Focus on the viral aspect and charge for upgrades like backup, long version control history, more templates, more pages, PDF conversion, larger file uploads, etc.
2. Focus on the enterprise and make it like an Enterprise wiki. Make features more suited for Intranets. Make it a pure pay product. We feel we have a big win in this field for the typical user because of our obsession with ease of use.
Forget enterprises. They have too many wants/needs/requirements (usually they don't really need the features, but I digress...). Focus on consumers and users that are willing to pay for upgraded features.
Don't go enterprise. The sales cycle will kill you.
If this was my service I'd do the following:
1) Everyone runs ads, you get the revenue (no revenue split)
2) Charge $5/month to take ads off
3) Charge $10/year for custom domains (make you you get a good affiliate deal for ___domain name reg, too)
4) Charge $XXX/year for large traffic sites (where XXX gives you a good profit on your costs)
Thanks, that's a great idea and something we are considering as well. It would be nice if we could make money off of premium features but the ad-sharing would let us at least pay the bandwidth costs.
I agree more with nl who posted above. Run ads on all sites by default, no rev split then charge users to remove ads.
A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.
The wordpress.com model is pretty tried and true (and making huge money), but it only works at pretty tremendous scale, I think. http://en.wordpress.com/products/
From what I understand, ads perform pretty poorly on blog sites (very little intent). That being said, you COULD try to go niche (say, make the best "blogging about products" platform and intent of the reader might be radically different).
Golden. Imagine every startup company that will sign up for a free site, then they get a bit more successful and want more than three pages or whatnot.
Same with the people who go from casual blogging to putting out a ton of posts.
What about education & higher ed? Seems like an enterprise wide (or district-wide, or campus-wide) tool for making dead simple webpages would be a killer way to spice up any class.
My company built and owns CityMax which is a website builder for small businesses. We have about 20,000 paying customers there and are profitable. This is more of a "can we change the world?" effort.
One of the key differences we believe is the table of contents on the side. Blogs are a modern representation of newspapers, magazines and other periodicals. One of our goals is to see if we can make a modern representation of books.
One nice thing that we have found is that many of our staff actually have multiple sites for different uses. We use one each for our two companies. I've got one between my wife and I. I have one to keep personal notes. It doesn't feel like we are using them just because we built it either.
In many ways I use it like a wiki but organizing a wiki has always been a weak point for me. I always end up with orphan pages with no links to them. Also, wikis are almost categorically ugly for some reason. On the other hand, blogs are often beautiful.
One of our design goals was to be "beautiful." Please check out our template designer. We think it might be one of the best in the industry (blog, website builder, or otherwise).
Quick initial comparo btw CityMax and Orbs (might as well...)
AKA: Challanger (Upstart) vs. Incumbent (Traditional)
1. Orbs throws you into the workflow without asking for anything. That is quite attractive compared to the traditional (CityMax) model. I really prefer to divulge my information if and only when I like the product.
2. I have decided: "Free" is the new 4 letter word. I don't want to see it until I decide I like the product.
3. Both have wierd names, it is tough to tell what either does from the outset.
I think in this market the only way to survive is to go the Ning route and make something just that much better, which yours might be and make it all premium, with a free 30 day trial.
- 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. :-)
I read the 'Start now' button as 'sign up' on a first glance too and was then confused by the 'no signup' text below it.
Maybe choose a word that doesn't begin with 'S' and doesn't have a shape like 'Sign Up' ... I like the 'jump in' idea, but maybe that is not culturally neutral enough.
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.
The password is probably encrypted, but reversibly so. That's still a potential security hole, but an attacker would need both the database (with its encrypted passwords) and the key.
Yes, that is correct. But we probably shouldn't email the password to the user. Just let them change it. Might consider a one-way hash instead of a two-way one though.
It does indeed seem a bit strange to require a username when an email-address is enough. However, my point was that even though they use usernames, they still allow you to simply login by using their e-mail address. That's a lot better than sites having a 'lost your username?' link IMHO.
Meh -- who would want their email address displayed? That's not a safe default. You'd just be punishing the users who don't manage to find the setting.
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.
Hmm... we do full testing and many of our staff, including myself, use it with Chrome regularly (and also Safari). I think this may be a bug only appearing in the Dev version of chrome which we aren't targetting.
We are trying to differentiate ourselves with the table of contents on the right. It's hard to tell when you start (because there aren't many pages) but the tree-like Table of Contents (with drag and drop) is great for larger sites.
Our staff site, for example, has over 100 pages but is nicely organized. The software can support 1000 page sites. Probably more but we haven't tested performance over 1000.
Thank you! I have played with it and it's really awesome...I have been planning to use weebly for a couple wiki but it's so hard to use for fast changes. Orbs fits the bill perfectly.
Some things I would love to see:
1. colors in text
2. security (can I store a bank account number or passowrd in a private orb)
3. renaming the home paeg
4. image linking to a web url instead of just allowed to upload
5. embedding stuff (photo slideshows, youtube videos etc..)
We were a little afraid of letting people choose arbitrary colors for text. One of our goals was to make it difficult to make a page ugly and easy to make it look good. We were considering that you could choose a highlight color though. The color would be part of your custom site design. Would this suit your purpose.
Currently, you can access the site through https: but that is not the default and it is not enforced. We might consider making an option to force the site to https:
Renaming the home page. Something I'm thinking about. Actually was thinking of removing the "home" part of the tree and just making the first real page the home page by default.
Image linking. I'll put that in a recommendation.
Embedding Stuff. This is in our plans already. We have a really cool implementation idea for this. :)
Thanks. After asking around, it looks like we have done Safari testing on OSX but we haven't fully tested Firefox on OSX. We assumed if Firefox worked in Win/Linux that it would work in OSX but that seems like a wrong assumption. Our testers will go through and test Firefox on OSX now though
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).
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.
Just to offer a counter-opinion, I went to the site searching for a video to explain it to me and left when I couldn't find it. I did click to start creating a site, but since I didn't have any site I actually wanted to create I felt intimidated by this approach and gave up immediately.
Looks like a slick product though, I will definitely give it a try when I have something I actually want to make! :)
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.
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.
The feedback on the design section is really helpful. We have been thinking of how to redesign the design section because of the issues with discoverability and these comments clarify some other issues.
The Insert URL issues has been noted. Thanks.
In terms of username, we did this to prevent somebody from just squatting all the good names. But clearly 'sjf' is not something we need to protect. I think we'll just take the most common first names and 1000 or so most common dictionary words and protect them though.
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.
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).
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.
How about: Have one big button for Quick Start, like you do, and either adding some buttons for "Wedding Quick Start", "Company" etc below that button.
Or on the page you land on after hitting "Start Now" keep your editable page, but also add those more specific buttons at the top (and also one with "Nah, leave me alone." to get rid of them).
You can also get rid of the "Start Now" button and just allow people to get started on the front page. (Have your invariable welcome section at the top, but put the edit area below. And of course you will need a good idea for how to get the URL of the newly created temporary page to your users.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
Certainly Orbs is a good replacement for a wiki. We are playing with an idea to allow for moderated wikis. In other words, you can take content from other people and choose which stuff you want to let in.
Good catch. We had this working before but I guess it's a bug that slipped through. It's been logged.
I don't know if you caught it, but there are some other table shortcuts like CTRL+Enter creates a new row below and CTRL+Shift+Enter creates a new row above.
We use it for our staff wiki at both of our companies. We've tried wikis before but found they were lacking in usability, particularly the problem with keeping it organized.
Just in case people are worried, apart from the home page, our app has been well tested on all the major browsers on three platforms (Mac, Win and Ubuntu). We just changed the homepage yesterday, partially for putting up this notice on Hacker News.
Do you have any plans to make it possible to use an orb for blogging?
One very simple way to turn a wiki into a blog is to add shortcut for "todays page". The shortcut should open page "/blog/yyyy/mm/dd" for editing. It is a killer feature for me in Zim desktop wiki (http://zim-wiki.org/).
You will probably have to add some sort of pages-listing-child-pages, but it shouldn't be very hard. I know, because I have tried it myself for a wiki I have been developing ;-)
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.
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?
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.
I've seen that before, PearBudget is the site I remember the most. I get that you're trying to get me through the funnel, but if the funnel is the only thing there and there's nothing there to tell me how gong the funnel is or why I should want to go through the funnel, then I'm going to bounce.
I get that you don't actually have to sign up, but pressing a big green button is a commitment of sorts.
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.
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.
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?
Actually, the editor strips out Javascript for safety reasons which unfortunately, makes it so users can't add GA. We're working out whether we should make exceptions when we do the strip or provide in-house stats.
+1 - this'd be _way_ more compelling for me if it had some sort of analytics integration. Doesn't _need_ to be Google Analytics, but that's probably the easiest choice...
(perhaps there's a business opportunity, do a deal with someone like getclicky.com - have a simple signup/installation of their tracking code in exchange for a revenue share...)
The idea is that since creating an Orb is so quick, it makes sense to create sites for all kinds of different things. We're trying to lower the threshold.
Instead of storing stuff locally, in Google Docs, in email, etc., Orbs becomes a handy place to store almost any kind of textual information.
Ok, but for example for a trip advisor I would have thought there would be registration of travelers, mailing lists, and so on. Maybe I misunderstood - of course if instead of an algorithm, you have some human updating the data on the site, all that is doable.
Thanks for the honest feedback. I just want to clarify whether it was the "snap", the fact that editing happens inline or the editor toolbar that you found confusing and cluttered. Or something else.
Unfortunately that is. My intended use is as a simple content management system for a friends business website. The interface is perfect, however they have paid for a website design(couple of sample pages) with the correct branding etc. Without being able to apply the branding we can't make use of your service. It's worth noting that I'd happily pay $20/month for your service if that was a possibility. The simplicity really is a strong selling point.
I think this idea if quite compelling. We will consider this for a future project. I can think of some things we can do to make this a perfect hybrid of "complete control for the designer" and "completely simple for the designer's client."
I think there are not enough templates yet if you wish to make this big enough to be profitable, so perhaps an advanced mode that allows you to tweak css would be good.
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.
Also check out Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org ), which is an open source CMS you install on your own server -- has in-place editing with drag and drop (and tons of other user-friendly features as well, like bulk file uploading, configurable forms, videos, maps, search, etc). And if you're a developer it's WAY more straightforward to extend than most PHP CMS's.
sitekreator is a little bit more expensive than that (http://sitekreator.com/sitekreator/pricing.html) but it does offer a lot that most of the alternatives mentioned here do not - how about a CDN, full Google Apps integration and some of the most advanced Photo Gallery Visualizations in the industry, just to start? ;)
And if you want more out of your designs, our Pro package gives you complete design freedom without having to write code.
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.