

 Rate my startup: Make stupid simple websites for work, play and life. - scottward
http://orbs.com

======
shirai
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.

~~~
catch404
Really like it and agree with your wiki point! are you planning to offer ssl
and an API? That's all it would take to move from my ugly backpack page

~~~
catch404
Also do you plan custom domain support? I'd imagine that could be a money
earner if you made it exremely simple for customers

~~~
shirai
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/>

------
webwright
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?

~~~
shirai
Forgot to answer the question.

Feels like we have two options for making 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.

Sunny

~~~
famousactress
3\. Let users make money off ads on their page and take a cut?

~~~
shirai
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.

Sunny

~~~
nl
Make your first premium feature the ability to take ads off it.

------
silverlight
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. :-)

~~~
Bitmobrich
I agree, the screenshots of example sites should open to the actual live site.

~~~
thesunny
Thanks for the suggestion. It is doing this now.

------
city41
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.

~~~
mhartl
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.

~~~
thesunny
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.

~~~
eru
Minor nitpick: There's no such thing as a two-way hash.

------
cschep
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.

~~~
shirai
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.

Sunny

~~~
warfare_expert
Do you plan to support search ? for a information filled wiki, search is
vital.

Any possibility for private pages/orbs ? especially for a couple to share
information.

~~~
thesunny
Yes, search is big on our list. Should be available soon.

~~~
warfare_expert
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..)

~~~
thesunny
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. :)

Sunny

~~~
warfare_expert
Thanks ! https also helps a lot. Looking forward to using it!

------
dlevine
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).

~~~
VMG
It's a shame it isn't developed anymore

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

~~~
thesunny
Can't remember exactly but I think it was around $10,000. We bought it a long
time ago.

------
SolarUpNote
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!

~~~
Goosey
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! :)

------
sjf
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.

~~~
thesunny
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.

------
ImperatorLunae
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.

------
obiefernandez
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. :(

~~~
admorphit
I agree with you, but there's a politer way to express your frustrations-

~~~
obiefernandez
Indeed. Just wasn't feeling very polite last night. My bad.

~~~
thesunny
Don't know if you'll read this but we will be setting the lower limit to three
characters and we may raise the upper limit as well.

------
losvedir
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.

~~~
thesunny
On not using the username for lookup, will put this in as a bug.

Will put a higher priority on not emailing the password as we had several
people mention this.

Sunny

------
markkanof
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.

~~~
thesunny
Thanks. The image does a real resize as well on the server although you
probably already knew that.

Thanks for the heads up on the "dialog box" popup. That's a bug that no one
noticed. I'll add that to our list.

Sunny

------
DeusExMachina
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.

~~~
thesunny
Thanks. Don't know how we missed that. It's on the fixit list.

------
greg_holsclaw
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.

------
prawn
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).

~~~
scottward
I suppose we'll need to include a captcha if we start to see a lot of crap
sites being created.

~~~
jasonkester
You'll need a lot more than that. Like right now, because they'll be headed
your way as soon as you get any exposure.

Here's what to do:

[http://expatsoftware.com/Articles/2010/03/care-and-
feeding-o...](http://expatsoftware.com/Articles/2010/03/care-and-feeding-of-
happy-spammer.html)

Bake all of that into your site from the beginning and hopefully you'll stay
off of Google's blacklist.

------
johns
Great domain name. How did you get it?

~~~
shirai
I think I found it at greatdomains.com

Sunny

------
jasonkester
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.

~~~
eru
How about: "Save", "Go back to editing", "Leave without saving". "Cancel" may
just be too ambiguous.

------
tomerico
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.

~~~
thesunny
How should we find out what your goal is? Little afraid of asking since that
would add to our quick startup process.

Sunny

~~~
eru
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.)

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

~~~
Huppie
I bet most people would easily pay $50/year for those features.

------
jonp
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.

------
hkuo
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.

------
fady
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..

~~~
warfare_expert
so expensive though for casual personal use...

~~~
neodude
The challenge for Orbs is to come up with a way to be profitable without make
it too expensive for casual use.

------
Poiesis
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.

~~~
shirai
We have a quick video (30 seconds or so?) but didn't stick it up yet. Maybe
we'll try and stick that in today though.

------
aquark
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.

~~~
wmwong
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.

------
qixxiq
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?

------
chaosmachine
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>

~~~
shirai
Urgh. Thanks.

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.

I'll get it changed to an image and hotfixed.

Sunny

------
bufordtwain
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.

~~~
thesunny
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.

------
howard_yeh
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.

~~~
shirai
We'll get that fixed.

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.

------
bretthellman
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.

~~~
shirai
Thanks for the feedback.

Would you mind giving us some examples of sites where you like how they
collect feedback?

Sunny

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

~~~
scottward
Yep. That's on the list.

~~~
emilis_info
I am very impressed.

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 ;-)

------
baltcode
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.

------
smysore
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?

------
3ds
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.

------
newmediaclay
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.

~~~
Poiesis
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.

~~~
eru
How about getting rid of the button and just making the first example part of
the starting page?

------
simonista
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.

~~~
shirai
Woe, that is ridiculous. Surprised nobody spotted that including me. Will get
this fixed.

------
Aegean
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.

------
GavinB
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.

------
jvandonsel
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.

~~~
Vweller
We added links to the sites on Friday! :)

------
bkj123
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?

~~~
scottward
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.

~~~
aquark
Why not just accept the GA id in the settings page and inject the code at the
right place yourselves?

Though simple in-house page view stats would probably work better for 99% of
your target audience than having to sign up for GA.

~~~
bigiain
+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...)

------
tofumatt
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.

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baltcode
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.

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

~~~
scottward
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.

~~~
Tichy
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.

~~~
scottward
Yeah, the sites are all free from text and human driven.

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

~~~
scottward
No, right now, it can only be on the right.

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

~~~
shirai
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.

Sunny

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

~~~
shirai
Here's some demo orbs that we created.

<http://honeymoon.orbs.com/> <http://hrteam.orbs.com/>
<http://ultimate.orbs.com/> <http://teacher.orbs.com/>
<http://mominvancouver.com> <http://foodies.orbs.com/>
<http://mominvancouver.com/>

Sunny

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

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

~~~
scottward
Probably not. Our focus is on simplicity and on the 20% of features that
deliver 80% of the value.

Is that a deal breaker for you?

~~~
ollysb
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.

~~~
thesunny
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."

Very interesting...

Sunny

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kmort
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.

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catch404
Is there a Twitter account to follow updates?

~~~
wmwong
Check @orbscom

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

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hariis
trying it out right now.

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

~~~
scottward
Click "Settings" at the top then "Users". Maybe we need to make that more
obvious.

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arsh
check <https://jottit.com/>

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obiefernandez
What did you write it in?

~~~
sdizier
We wrote it in Ruby using an in-house framework. The db is
<http://www.mongodb.org> which we have found to be awesome.

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dan_b
Very very slick.

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howard_yeh
a screencast of the app would nice

~~~
notahacker
I actually prefer the "one click to start using"

~~~
howard_yeh
maybe directly embed the screen cast in the starting template

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usernoms
very slick

~~~
robaato
Looks very nice.

You might also consider licensing the technology to other sites etc...

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klbarry
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.

~~~
jordanlev
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.

