This Is Locomotion - Design, Code, and News

Well I sat down this weekend and thought I’d highlight a few of my favorite websites, and 2 of my favorite designers I’ve discovered this year. With all the buzz and hype of “Web 2.0″ everything, I’ve narrowed down 8 websites from 2006 that I’ve actually found useful.

Basecamp – Project Management

Simple project management with to-do lists, milestones, time tracking, file sharing, calendars, and more. We use Basecamp to take charge of communication, collaboration, and organization for projects big and small. The design is simple, yet effective. The book they have written titled “Getting Real” has been an eye opener in it’s approach to developing web-based applications.

Visit site: basecamphq.com

Blinksale – Online Invoicing

The easiest way to send invoices to your clients via email. If you are entrepreneurial you’ll really appreciate the simplicity of the design behind this tool. We use Blinksale for all our invoicing and we love it. Some of our favorite features of Blinksale include:

• Simplistic invoice creation
• Send a Thankyou
• Send a Reminder
• Tracking all our open and closed invoices
• Keeping track of our sales in a really simple format

Visit site: blinksale.com

Feedburner – Feed Management Provider

We use Feedburner to provide statistics, and formatting for our RSS feed that is generated by our blog. Over the past year Feedburner has really taken off, and we’ve been really impressed with the simple tools they provide to manage RSS feeds.

Visit site: feedburner.com

Cameron Moll – An Admirable Portfolio

Having read a few of Cameron’s books and after taking a glance through his portfolio I’ve been really impressed by his sense of style and simplicity. His site (in particular his portfolio page) has a lot of design touches, which I find classy.

Visit site: cameronmoll.com/portfolio

Threadless – The Never-Ending Tshirt Contest

From the first t-shirt I’ve bought I’ve been hooked. This site sets the standard for e-commerce in my opinion. The checkout process is simple, professional, and fast. In addition the mission of the company is really neat. People around the world design and submit t-shirt designs, and then the community rates them to decide what gets printed. Tshirts by the people, for the people.

Visit site: threadless.com

Facebook – Social networking for College’s and University’s

The ‘who’s who’ for college students, Facebook is a university networking tool (you need a uni affiliated email to sign up) that allows you to keep track of your college friends using relationship tracking, degrees of separation, photo albums, specialty groups, and more.

Visit site: facebook.com

Cork’d – Wine for the Masses

Cork’d is making life easier for wine lovers. You can catalog, rate, and review wines in your Wine journal, find out what your buddies are tasting, and discover new wines to try and buy. A one stop shop for finding a good wine, be it for a dinner party with friends, or trek on New Year’s.

Visit site: corkd.com

CSS Zen Garden – CSS Based Design

Although this is a bit of old news – I really got into CSS based design this year, and the Zen Garden has been a prime place to find some neat design ideas, and see the code behind it.

Visit site: mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/ or csszengarden.com

Hicks Design – Another Great Designer

Yet another designer I’ve grown to admire over the past year. Jon Hicks is the owner, and has some really top-notch portfolio work. He’s done icons for some of my favorite programs such as Firefox, Thunderbird, and skEdit.

Visit site: hicksdesign.co.uk

claimID – Reclaim Your Online Identity

claimID lets you track, verify, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you online. We use it to display what work is about us, and what is not.

Visit site: claimid.com