---
title: A Widget for Your Finger!
teaser:
tags: news,web,widgetfinger
author: Chad Pytel
published_on: 2007-05-17
---

*Note*: Widgetfinger is no longer operational. Please [contact us] if you would
like a product like this for your company.

[contact us]: https://thoughtbot.com/hire-us

The transitions that thoughtbot has gone through over the last 12 months have
been incredible.  We've successfully transformed from a full service information
technology consulting company to a web application development company,
continued to build a team of great developers, and completed some truly fun and
amazing projects for clients.

While we continue to do great client work, I'm happy to say that the time has
finally come to begin to pull back the curtains on thoughtbot's first
product—[widgetfinger](http://www.widgetfinger.com).  We (thoughtbot and
shotgunflat) have been using widgetfinger internally now for several months, in
fact the [shotgunflat website](http://www.shotgunflat.com) has been hosted on
widgetfinger for a little over two weeks now, and many of their client's sites
have been successfully running on widgetfinger for quite a bit longer than that.

The old thoughtbot used to make normal, portfolio type (home, about, services,
contact us pages) websites.  Over the past several months, we've transitioned
away from this work—working closely shotgunflat to transfer the work to
them in as seamless a transition as possible for our clients.

As part of building and hosting these normal websites, we ran into a bunch of
issues that we feel most design firms likely face.

* Needing to maintain your own servers, or maintain lots of disparate hosting
  accounts
* Struggling to keep track of passwords
* Giving your clients access to edit the copy of their site is difficult, if not
  impossible

We never quite found a good solution to the first two, and the last item we had
solved by giving our clients access to a pretty lame editor we pieced together
in Perl, which did the trick, but had several issues, not the least of which was
that it was not straightforward to use, and needed to be set up from scratch for
each new website.

We also found that full fledged content management systems were way overkill for
the majority of portfolio type websites, and most still had the issue of needing
to be set up from scratch for each new website.

In the position we were in, we started to formulate some ideas about a simple
content management system, specifically geared towards small design firms and
one man shops, that would abstract away the drudgery and complexities of
maintaining your own hosting environment, renting piecemeal accounts, and giving
your clients a dead simple way to edit their website.

With our long-time design partner, shotgunflat, at our side we began about the
work of building something that _we_ could use.  We felt that if we could build
something that suited us, that it just might suit others, as well.

We hope that we've been on the right track, and its moments like the one below
that have indicated that we are:

|Drew M.|widgetfinger is #awesome|
|Jon Y.|Thanks!|
|Drew M.|it just took me 38 minutes to go from a PSD to having my|
|       |internal pages done|
|Chad P.|thats great!|
|Chad P.|"widgetfinger is #awesome" - we'll use that as a|
|       |testimonial on the website =)|

Well, anyway—this post is turning out to be pretty long.  I'll cut to the
chase.  We're now putting widgetfinger into a private beta phase.  We'd like to
find a few like-minded design firms who think widgetfinger might be for them, to
give it a shot.  Since widgetfinger is a hosted webservice, it'll be free during
the beta phase, and we'll eventually offer discounted plans for those people who
participated in the beta who decide to stick with it.

A last word of warning - widgetfinger won't be for everyone, and thats the way
we want it.  Its very much geared toward the simple, portfolio type website, and
we'll be fighting against any tendency to go beyond that.  We feel that by
focusing on that specific functionality, we can make a very powerful tool.

If you're interested in participating in the private beta, please [contact
us].  You can also enter your email over at
[www.widgetfinger.com][finger], and we'll be sure to keep you posted as things
progress.

[finger]: http://www.widgetfinger.com

Over the next few days (in between sessions at RailsConf), we'll be following up
this post with some more posts exposing some of the functionality in and
technology behind widgetfinger.