Site44 Turns Dropbox Folders Into Websites

I've always wanted a really lightweight way to publish websites. It turns out that my co-founder, Todd Proebsting, was looking for the same thing. We couldn't find anything that met our needs, so we decided to build it. The result is Site44, our startup's first product.

What is Site44?

Site44 turns Dropbox folders into websites. You pick a domain for your website, Site44 creates a folder for it in your Dropbox, and then you publish by just dropping content into that folder.

What Site44 does not do is host server-side code, like PHP and ASP.NET. It's for pure static sites, but I'm continually amazed at how many sites are static (or can be).

Sign up for the beta!

Site44 is in a private beta (about thirty friends and family members). We'd love feedback from everyone, though, so I'd appreciate it if you took a few minutes to browse around site44.com, learn what it's about, and maybe watch our tutorial video. If you like what you see, sign up for future beta invites on our home page.

Who's it for?

It's for people like Todd and me—essentially, anyone who creates HTML and wants an easy way to publish it to the web. We'd love to hear from you on how you might use Site44, but here are some use cases we think will be popular:

• Web designers sharing their designs with clients
• Web developers/designers standing up a quick site (e.g. guess.site44.com, typewriter.site44.com)
• Individuals putting up "about me" pages or resumes (e.g. about.smarx.com)
• Bloggers hosting their blogs (e.g. this blog)
• Businesses publishing a home page

This blog, powered by Site44

This weekend, I migrated my blog over to Site44. The blog is now statically generated using Pelican, which is a static blog generator written in Python (similar to the more popular Ruby-based Jekyll). I publish to the web by just pointing Pelican's output to a folder in Dropbox.

I also took this opportunity to add commenting to my blog via Disqus, so I'm looking forward to hearing from you in the comment section.