Wednesday, May 13, 2009

My Top 10 Favorite Websites for I.T. People

Last month, I shared my top ten favorite tools for I.T. pros. This month, I'm sharing my top ten favorite websites for I.T. pros. This would have been a fairly easy list to compile, but then I decided to filter sites by six criteria as follows:

  1. It had to be a site that provides information I need
  2. It had to be a site that offers good stuff for free. It's okay if they charge for premium services, but there just had to be a lot of good stuff for fee. That eliminated sites like Experts-Exchange.
  3. It had to be a site that is substantially about I.T. That eliminated sites like Wikipedia and Google.
  4. It couldn't be a vendor site. As good as they are, I just didn't want to include Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, etc. on my list. Hey, it's my list; I get to choose!
  5. It couldn't be a tools site such as Solar Winds. As helpful as those types of sites are, I wanted sites that were primarily about information.
  6. It could be a site that I don't necessarily visit often, but one where I subscribe to their RSS feed such as Paul Thurott's WinSuperSite.

After I created the six criteria, I realized that there are really only about five sites I use regularly (other than vendor sites and, of course, Google and Wikipedia). So, here are my top five, plus five more sites that I don't use often but which are helpful.

The five that I use regularly:

Five more that are definitely worth a look:

I'm sure you've got favorites of your own. Leave a comment and let me know what they are.