UPDATE: This post title has been updated to include the date. -ac

This week, I’ve come across quite a few high quality sites, but I’ll only go in depth on a few of them here and perhaps detail others later in the week.

• Ziki is a new take on a personal homepage, with it’s own flavor. Rather than try and position itself as a one-stop-shop of online content for your browsing, where it would be up against some stiff competition from iGoogle and Netvibes, Ziki is instead your personal homepage for other people to access. It contains a short bio about you, and provides links to your blog/website and your profile on a multitude of other sites, including LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, etc. In addition, after you tag your own page with up to five keywords so that other Ziki users can network to you, you can turn on the search engine optimization feature. Ziki guarantees the placement of your Ziki page in the top results on all the major search engines, so when other people search for you, they will land on your Ziki page and be able get basic information about you and navigate to all your other profiles across the internet without having to dig further into the search engine results. Definitely a cool tool for those who want to be easily accessible via the internet! For an example, check out my Ziki page here.

• Jimdo is an awesome new tool for building your own website, if you are looking for a solid non-blog feel. It is by far the easiest layout editing I have ever seen for building a site, including software-based programs. You navigate to your page, login, and you see a toolbar pop out on the right side with editing options and tools, but the main part of the screen still looks exactly like your site. As you edit, the changes are visible and all the time, you know exactly what your site looks like as you edit it, without page refreshes or constant saves. As far as simplicity and usability are concerned, Jimdo is truly amazing. You can even edit the HTML aspects of your site’s modules…I have not tested it for embedding objects or tracking codes, but it seems that it would not be hard to do. If you are looking for a place to build a quality personal website without the hassle of programming and ease of use that puts all other sites to shame, I highly recommend Jimdo.

• Collectivex is a really great tool I stumbled upon this week that allows you to essentially create your own small social networking site or an online information hub for a group. You create what they call a ‘Groupsite’ and invite others to come join your group, and with customizable privacy settings, you can make your group as open or as exclusive as you want. Once on your groupsite, members can share files, photos, messages, etc, and there are plenty of upgrade options available a la carte including ad removal, increased storage, etc…and an enterprise edition if you want to use the site to deploy a company intranet. This is really a great site if you want a non-public, group specific way to keep everyone up to speed and plugged in to to information!

• Tractis has been around for a little while and has made its way around the blogosphere a few times, but I just recently started looking into it features and services. Tractis offers an easy interface to construct contracts that you can even personalize with company logos and colors. Also, the site has a large database of templates that are easily searchable in order to quickly find a fit for your needs. With the collaborative features, multiple people can work on a single document and can also subscribe to an RSS feed to track changes or updates to a document. This is a really promising site that I haven’t had a whole lot of time to fully explore (or any contracts to build, for that matter) but it appears to be an awesome online tool for small businesses or entrepreneurs that could potentially save lots and lots of money by doing contracts by themselves.