Hey, just wanted to point some love at Smashing Magazine’s Best of April 2007 article.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Smashing website, they are famous for their lists…lots of lists…
I always like their “Best of” lists because there are always a couple (or more) sites that I haven’t seen before. Those quickly go into my blogmarks account for later reference.
Anyways, if you have a few, go check it out.
So if you read my article yesterday you might be a bit confused about this one. Why would someone who doesn’t get the whole reboot thing, have a post about the best reboot sites?
Well, I am glad you asked. Jon responded to my request for someone to explain the whole reboot thing. Here was his comment:
it’s a great way to get a lot of free advertisment if you do a good job. like a trade show, people show up because they know they’ll have access to a lot of people that are tooling about, specifically looking for something to get excited about.
internet foot trafic
That is a great answer, and made me realize that the reboot is kinda like a contest, where the prize is getting traffic to your site because of your new design. So I figured today that I would do my part for the community and give a little traffic to those sites that I liked for one reason or another.
So here we go, after looking through the vast majority of the sites from the two reboot sites, here are the ones that I liked the most (in no particular order).
Online start pages have been around for a while now, so I know I am not breaking new ground here to talk about them. There are lots of them…some good, some..not so much. What makes them interesting from a UI perspective are the different ways they each try to sum up the information.
When the first generation of these came out AJAX was a household cleaner to all but the most cutting edge designers and developers out there. Pageflakes was a Microsoft poster boy because they went headfirst and started to use ATLAS (MS’s custom AJAX implementation) while it was still in early beta (which was a beast, let me tell you). The other front runners (netvibes, google, and start.com live.com) waded in with their own custom AJAX goodies.
It was pretty amazing stuff at the time (drag and drop? on a webpage? Awesome.), and even though we see it all over now, the start pages are still pretty sweet.
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