A few services were a tremendous help in launching my new site, SiteViper.com. You can read all about the new site and how it improves the process of buying websites in my previous post. I thought that it would be worthwhile to talk through the key services I used.
vWorker.com – During development, I was stuck on writing a regular expression to extract a domain name from a block of text. After some futile searching, I posted the project on vWorker (formerly Rent a Coder) to have a regexp guru solve my problem. Within a few hours, I had over 20 developers bidding on the project. One of the developers knocked out the project in no time, and I avoided coding frustration and focused on moving the project forward. It costs me $15, and it was worth every penny.
MailChimp – I wanted to set up an email list so that I could send out a weekly email of all of the best listings in the marketplace. I looked at a number of different email providers, and MailChimp seemed like a decent solution. It has exceeded my expectation. Setting up the mailing list, customizing the email, and integrating the sign up form with my site was far easier than I expected.
After coding up the very initial version, I was not happy with the speed and responsiveness of the site. The two tools below cut down the load size of my page and helped to speed up the site.
Smush.it – The template that I used for the site had some sizable images, and I had no idea how to optimize them in GIMP. Some quick googling revealed that Smush.it was the answer to my problem. The service lets you upload image files and it returns to you a zip file of all of your image files optimized, without degrading image quality. I was skeptical at first, but the results were fantastic. My total image size was reduced by 70%. This is by far my favorite Yahoo! product.
Amazon CloudFront – My webhost had a very easy to use integration with Amazon’s CloudFront, their CDN service. After uploading images and CSS files to CloudFront, Amazon places them on its servers around the world and then pulls the images from the servers closest to the visitors to your site. Images loaded noticeably faster after setting this up.
