Thursday, May 1, 2008

Flight 013: Home Sweet Home


I've gotten the chance to play with some new applications this week in my time off the road. The first is Wix - a really cool site that allows you to create Flash sites through their own UI. While it's still currently in beta and has a ways to go in offering all the touches needed for creating a full custom site, it has a pretty fun and intuitive UI that can definitely help you get a basic site up and running in just a few days. They also state that search engines will still be able to scrape the contents, a big problem that most Flash sites are facing today. I've started a redesign of my personal site through it so we'll see how it goes. I gotta say that it's a hell of a lot more fun than opening up HTML-Kit and starting from zero. To the right is a screenshot of the UI.

The other product I'm looking at is Woopra. Since readership here is still a bit low right now, I don't think I've gotten to experience all the cool features. However, one way it distinguishes itself from all of the other web analytics applications I've seen is that it has a real-time view of who's on your site in that moment. For example, the image on the left shows that 1 visitor is on my site. Sadly enough, it's just me! :) I've read that it's even cooler for those who are on Wordpress though - the plugin will automatically display the name of who's on your site if they are logged in. Cool and creepy, eh?

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