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Ask YC: Feedback on our webapp (website-building tool)

19 points by admanrs ↗ HN
http://orgu.com

We have just launched a website creation tool for group-based websites. A few student organizations have been using it since alpha (you'll see them at the bottom of the homepage) and they really like it so far.

It utilizes the Blogger XML template language (and can use any template of this type), so the sites look a lot like blogs. However, you might say they are suped-up blogs, with added features like calendar and photos.

We are 2 people, we have recently graduated in the Chicago area, we hope to pursue this as a startup. The webapp is still very much in beta (and there are many half-baked features), but we just wanted valuable feedback from the YC community to help us in future iterations. Thanks so much!

29 comments

[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 82.8 ms ] thread
admanrs
oh yeah... we are aware of a possible naming conflict with orgoo.com, so we're thinking about rebranding. any suggestions for new names would be appreciated.
GavinB
groupingtogether.com is available if you want to go in a more real word direction.

SiteForYour.Org is also available.

Overall it looks good. You might want to put a live admin demo up so that a site visitor is one click away from seeing what the admin interface looks like.

rksprst
I like the demos. I can see lots of fraternities and sororities using it. Is there any plan to do marketing/pr? Is there also a paid version (to use your own domain)?
admanrs
even though we have launched, we aren't trying to attract major pr yet. we want to beef up a few features a little more first, but when we do, we're thinking (besides announcing on the standard internet portals) to talk to some large national organizations (greek, community, etc). there is no paid version, but you CAN currently use your own domains for free. (in the "settings" tab)
jcdreads
It's nice, but for rock-bottom low-friction signup and easy (Markdown-based) formatting you might want to consider emulating jottit.com.

It's also possibly worthwhile to add a "dump entire site as a bunch of text" button; to bring people back, send them away, or whatever the aphorism is.

Nice demo.

drusenko
Are you kidding? jottit is "nice" in that you can "start using it" right away, but you're slamming users up against the empty form wall in full force. Upon arriving at jottit.com, I don't know what jottit does at all, and I certainly don't know what to put in the damn box.
jcdreads
Right. As I said, and for exactly the reasons you state, the only aspects of jottit.com I'd recommend emulating are the fast (lazy) signup and the ability to type Markdown text instead of using raw HTML or a heavy rich text widget.

(And while I happen to think jottit is cute, note that I had reserved the ornate and completely pretentious praise of "nice" for orgu. :)

lizherring
Looks nice. Being compatible with Blogger themes is a smart move. How do you plan to compete with Google Pages, Weebly, and all the other site builders? A calendar and a member directory might not be a big enough differentiator.
drusenko
Actually, Weebly isn't much in the same space. The newly re-designed Google Sites (Jotspot 2.0), site/wiki builders like Wetpaint, or social network builders like Ning are all in the "facilitate group communication" space, and all look to fill the same need.
admanrs
we're not so much in the 'group communication' space as the 'web publishing' space. our main goal is to make interesting/useful/rich websites (though we may harness group communication for content). we want these websites to be valuable for those within the group AND mean something for those outside.
enki
why do i have to sign up to give it a try?
admanrs
ideally we would have a 'live demo' but our current architecture makes this tough. this is 1st on our list though.
wave
The middle box where you have references to Calendar, Easy Photos, Member Directory and Group Blog should be clickable to sample pages. People want to see sample pages before creating their own websites.

It would be great if you let people create websites without having to signup. Once they are ready to save then you can ask them to signup.

admanrs
thats a really good point, thanks. i was just looking at 37signals' backpack homepage and they handle this pretty well. might do something similar
staunch
Using Blogger templates is an awesome idea. How you're supporting them (was it easy)?
admanrs
it was actually painfully hard. we ended up with a very elegant solution though... Blogger has a set of widgets, but we introduce some new ones (like a 'Photos' widget or an 'Events' widget). These sort of inherit from existing ones (by transforming their templates), so designers only have to code html+css for the standard 'Blog' widget and the others are inferred
admanrs
btw, we had to make a custom blogger xml interpreter from scratch
staunch
Thanks for the info. Now I have an urge to create an open source standard for site themes based on Blogger templates or something else. Some things might be too specific (like the way a typical blog is formated) but lots of the elements could certainly be constructed in a way that they'd be interchangeable across totally different kinds of sites. Maybe Google Gadgets addresses part of this problem. Hmmm...
ameilij
Real nice application! I can't find anything wrong about it, great work!
mattmaroon
Looks very nice. Few thoughts: 1. Why does it ask for my first and last name when signing up? I expected that field to want a screenname, given the pretty standard signup box requiring sn, email, password, password again you find everywhere. 2. Do you have to use a java uploader for pics? I'd rather just upload one at a time manually than have to have java on my PC. Can that at least be an alternative?
admanrs
we use your f+lname as your identity when you post things and invite other people to the site. the point about the confusion over the sn field is valid, we might want to reformat that screen (or ideally have a live demo that eases into a real membership - like weebly).

we use the same java/activex image uploader that facebook uses (hoping people would be familiar w/ it). however, there should be an option "use the simple uploader" that will take u to a standard file-input setup. let me know if this isnt showing up.

whyleyc
Nice site.

One question - How do you handle the auto-creation of user-specified subdomains ? (I ask as I'd like to do something similar)

Do you run your own DNS or do you update records at your DNS provider ? (If the latter how do you automate that process ?)

admanrs
if you have a wildcard in dns records, you can effectively make it a fallback, so thats how our something.orgu.com addresses get mapped to an IP. however, we do allow tld's, we handle that by hosting our own instance of PowerDNS, which is great (u can use mysql with it)
rob
Looks cool. Did you use a PHP framework for the admin backend, or did you write everything from scratch?
admanrs
we wrote it from scratch
jbyers
It's nice work, congratulations! As someone else said, leveraging Blogger templates is a great idea.

All PHP + MySQL?

Curious to know if 'orgu' indicative of the target market, university groups? Or am I reading too much into those four letters? :)

I think your greatest challenge will be breaking out of the huge array of similar and seemingly-similar products out there. This is a battle more likely won by marketing than technology. Find that niche, attack it, dominate it, and you'll do well.

admanrs
thanks! yep, its all php and mysql. we imagine 'orgu' means something like organization-universe or (you guessed it) organization-university, but in reality we wanted to pick as short a name as possible so groups using the .orgu.com subdomains wouldn't have a long url.
ceb843
this looks incredible! it is exactly the type of webapp i've been looking for. many of the other sites are too cluttered, orgu is simple and easy to use. thanks for creating such a great tool.

will you eventually have a way to completely customize my own template and not be limited to the ones offered? also- will you eventually be charging to use the site? how are you planning on making money??

admanrs
thanks! you can completely customize your template w/ the blogger xml template language. the editor is somewhat crippled though, u cant expand the html of widgets, but thatll come soon. we're also gonna put up some better documentation for it