Creating A Custom Homepage With Xerpi

Xerpi provides a hassle-free way to create a customizable homepage. With Xerpi, you can organize and save your favorite links, access those links from anywhere – home, work, internet cafés, etc., and quickly search links and find relevant results. Con Way Ling, the founder of Xerpi, is using this ReviewMe review more for feedback than for promotion. He would like comments and recommendations on what Xerpi can do to provide a better user experience.

In his Email to me, Mr. Ling said, “We know one of the things we need to improve is the sign up. Comments there are welcome but the real benefit of the sites comes from just using the site after your links are stored and saved.” I found the sign up extremely easy. However, the spam question should be made simpler. Most of the time it’s just an easy math questions but one time I got, “Who was the first president of the United States (last name only)?” You’ll be amazed at how many Americans don’t know the answer. Xerpi offers three sign up methods.

• The Quickie: Choose your areas of interests and Xerpi sets up your page! One click and you’re done (5 seconds).
• The Set Up: Pick out specific links from categories for a custom page! A few clicks and you’re done (1-2 minutes).
• The Real Deal: Full control for building the perfect Xerpi page from your own links (3-5 minutes).

The Xerpi Homepage

My first impression of the Xerpi Beta homepage was it looks a lot like a Google personalized homepage. The main difference is Google displays mostly RSS feeds while Xerpi provides a nice easy way to display all your favorite websites.

The concept behind Xerpi is a nice one. Many web users have dozens (some have hundreds) of sites stored in their browser favorites. By storing and organizing these favorites in Xerpi, you have access to them from any computer, anywhere in the world. This is great for a mobile techie or someone who works from multiple computers or locations. The homepage is very clean and extremely easy to use.

How Does Xerpi Make Money?

According to Xerpi About Us page, “Xerpi makes money through partner agreements. These agreements bring you services you already use like search. Our partners are world-class providers bringing you the best services while keeping our operating costs low by not re-inventing the wheel.” Right now, it looks like Xerpi sole source of income is Google search. We’ll just have to wait and see what other partners bring to the table.

The Xerpi Search

In addition to offering searches by Google, Xerpi offers their own search engine. The searches are based on tags. Tags are keywords that describe links, and help you get the most from Xerpi. When you create a link, and associate tags to it, you are enriching the Xerpi experience for yourself and all other Xerpi users in two ways:

• Tags power Tags Links Blocks, which let you dynamically view all links saved by Xerpi users to a particular tag
• Tags power Xerpi Search, which lets you search for all links associated to a tag.

Right now, the Xerpi search feature is very limited because of a lack of users. As more users start using Xerpi as their favorites organizer, their search feature should be a lot more useful. Xerpi supports both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox. Using a non-supported browser may find that some functions of Xerpi do not work as expected.

Looking For Feedback

As I’ve stated at the start of this review, Xerpi is still in beta and looking for feedback. Who better to provide feedback then fellow webmasters and bloggers? Give Xerpi a try and let them know what you think of it and where you think they can improve.

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