These are our picks for the top ten best websites or web applications for 2011.
Our criteria was simple: Our life is just that much better for using them.
Our thanks to all the people who put in all the hard work to get these sites out there – you’ve done a great job, and we think everyone should know about it!
Strictly for developers, Heroku knows their customers and did an amazing job of building a website (and a service) that developers love to love. Through almost every interaction we’ve had with Heroku, we learned to like them even more. Extra bonus for the website just being damned nice to look at.
We do some video here, and ZenCoder became our "must have" tool this year for working with all the various video formats and standards.
MX Tooklbox is priceless for diagnosing email problems. MXToolbox makes dealing with annoying email tasks almost as sexy as Liv Tyler, but I digress.
We started using Harvest over the last year or so. The features for doing estimates is perfect for some of our clients, cutting down the time it takes to get a proposal out by about 90%. We also use it in combination with co-op.
"My internt thing doesn’t work!" – We’ve all gotten that phone call or email right? No details, no usable information, no nothing. Support Details comes to the rescue, being the quickest way to find out what your end user is using for a computer, OS, Web Browser and software versions.
Hands down the best designed website for an individual promoting his brand. Beyond the great design, Derek Sivers offers some insanely great life lessons – our favorites being Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama, It’s either HELL YEAH or no! or anything in his most popular list.
pusher.com makes it amazingly easy to bring real-time interactions to your applications without having to rely on the resource sucking Ajax polling practices of old. Used in combination with task queuing systems like resque, you can create some user experiences to write home about.
Extremely easy to implement, indextank.com allowed you to search through boatloads of data from your own website and display the results before you could bat an eyelash! We loved this thing, but LinkedIn bought them and gutted the talent pool. Now we have one more reason to not use LinkedIn.
This year found us lurking into the “No-SQL” movement shadows. As we began experimenting with the possibilities of a world free from the purgatory of SQL dribble and the traditional normalized hell we all know so well…we found solace in mongohq.com. MongoHQ made using MongoDB in our applications a breeze. We didn’t need to find a hosting provider willing to install MongoDB, we can use MongoHQ from anywhere! They’ve been good to us, and extremely easy to get up and running as we push forward on our pilgrimage to a better world.
And finally, we have to include YaRacer. It is, hands down, the easiest, fastest and simplest way for anyone running a motor sports event to handle their racers, events, registrations and club members, if we do say so our selves, and we do. That’s because we built it ourselves over the last year, and we are damned proud of it. 