I had a conversation earlier today with a designer and we were noticing how so many designs are copied. Everyone wants to be like the leaders in their particular market segment. Here is a list of web applications that are so Spankin’ Good that everyone wants to copy them.
- Basecamp – Blinksale, FreshBooks
- BatchBook – Highrise
- Campaign Monitor
- Clickdensity
- Digg – Reddit, De.licio.us
- Drop.io
- Flickr – Photobucket
- MySpace – Friendster, Facebook, etc.
- Pandora – Jango
- Paypal – Google Checkout
- Salesforce – SugarCRM, RightNow, etc.
- Wikipedia
- Yelp – Rate My Area/
There are more, but as I review different web applications I see a lot of common trends in designs between them. It is part of an evolutionary progress of web applications that has really been part of the progress of applications before the dawn of the Interweb or humanity. As frameworks improve (Ruby-on-Rails, Zend, Cakephp, Spring, etc.) and gain popularity the default setups and as designs (BluePrintCSS) become standard I think we’ll see more of this trend of look-alike applications.
I’m sure I’ll be writing a post on how to create Spankin’ good applications in the future, but for now take a look at some of the hottest, study them, and then copy the best parts of them to create your own Spankin’ good app.
2 Comments
Hey, thanks for including Campaign Monitor in your list! “so Spankin’ Good” is one of my favourite descriptions yet of our app 😉
Hey, Mathew, glad you liked it. A lot has been said about your application and the fine work you do. I love your simple pricing approach and your intuitive interface that plays well with others. Wish I could say the same for software developed by some of the largest companies (I won’t mention names, but I’ve had a more than a few conversations about them recently). Best wishes on your continued success and if we are ever in Sydney we just might pay a visit. 🙂 Cheers.
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[…] We then scratched the surface of designing and developing great applications. After all web developers are the key to keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive. First make sure that you get paid for the work you do. If you are using the software as a service (SaaS) model you have different options for Application Pricing. How do you create fans of your web application? By creating Apps that are Spankin’ Good. […]