10 years & 2 startups later, I Finally Built What I Always Needed to Create Websites. It’s a Good Day.
Heya SiteUp!
It’s funny how in life we go through this whole journey of self-discovery, uncertainty, maturing… just to get to a point that you knew all along. Or is it just me?
To give you more context: I’m a full-stack developer by trade, with a (very) keen eye for design. And ever since I built my first website, it seemed so odd to me that (more often than not) designers and developers sit in different rooms! And it’s always been like that, so it feels normal. It makes us behave like we don’t need to understand each other — and too much of our work and talent is wasted because of that.
I truly believe that we need a much, much better connection between designers and developers to built better products.
Long story short — after 10 years of making sites and startups, it’s fair to say that has become more than a belief and last year I started seriously thinking of how creating a community to bridge this gap.
About a year ago today (😸🎉) I started building MaterialUp, a place to find the best of Material Design, daily. I was stoked to see as many designers as developers joining and quickly, together with my partner Guillemette, we grew the community and expanded the concept to the world of iOS with iOSUp. Today, at last, we’re finally expanding to where I always wanted to be: site design & development.
Welcome to SiteUp, a place for designers and developers to find quality inspiration and the latest resources.
What is SiteUp?
SiteUp is for all designers and developers who create websites for work, or just because (← I wonder what the proportion is?).
It serves two purposes: to find fresh inspiration, resources and solutions, and t0 celebrate our work and get feedback from like minded peers.
Through a daily curated showcase (à la Product Hunt), we uncover beautiful websites, but also rad experiments, front-end resources, and a lot more. We also make sure none of it falls into oblivion with collections and a very powerful search.
By the way, if you’re wondering who designed our very own website, it’s the awesome team at Aerolab 👏
Why now? Two reasons.
The first. I have never found that place that celebrates the great creators behind awesome websites. Aside from our own portfolio, or worse our resume, we (developers and designers) never get to put our name on projects. If there’s celebration and praise, the brand or the agency gets it. There are so many awesome websites that are built, I want to reach out to the developer and designer behind it, tell them bravo and ask them questions about how they built it! I think it’s essential to really keep up to date with what’s going on.
Second reason. I’ll say it again: designers and developers should not be working in separate rooms! Why do we do that? We’re working on the same product, and by not talking and understanding each other’s work we’re wasting valuable time and talent we all have put into it. Every morning, I want to find inspiration in a place where both designers and developers hang out and talk about their work and choices. I think that we’re realizing that now and there’s a shift happening where we’re getting closer and creating more inclusive workflows. A testament to that is how new tools take an approach to fill that gap: like nearly all prototyping tools, Sketch which is more developer friendly, or Material Design, a design language that speaks to both designers and developers.
Oh, and also because in just a few days of ßeta, SiteUp’s already seen amazing things being shared:
Websites
Porfolios
Experiments
Front-end resources
So come along! Discover & Share the best of web design and the latest front-end resources. It’s all on SiteUp!
You can also follow us on Twitter or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, which contains the best of the week and a few extras :)
Special thanks to:
- Aerolab for designing SiteUp. Your work is nothing short of amazing and we love working with you!
- The huge community of ßeta users who got excited with about SiteUp and tested the hell out of the site. A million thanks!
- Our group of moderators who have been with us since the beginning: Alex Tokmakchiev, Petja Touru, Jurre Houtkamp, Giacomo Alonzi, Benjamin Gonin, Michael Cook, Austin Andrews, Marco Piccolino, and many others.
