Two nice rounded image headers, one for each, large ENTER URL HERE box, prompt for registration on entering the URL. What's so complicated?
this is going to sound harsh, but looking at your site, I couldn't care less. I go to a lot of sites, regularly share URLs with people, I'm your target audience, and I'm not interested. It's overwought. It's not that your frontpage needs to do a lot, it's that the page sucks.
If I visit, I want to submit a URL and then get analytics on the flipside. Everything that isn't related to that task is extraneous.
Why not just nuke the entire page, put in a bigass textarea for copying in a url, a submit button, and two small rounded image boxes describing, respectively, URL Shortening and Analytics? You'd have a site that's approximately 10 trillion and a half times better.
It's not that anyone's missing something, it's that your site fails to get across why your site is useful.
API still important, if not critical, in my eyes.
If you havent already, I would do a benchmark of Google Analytics and other free analytics companies and try to see what are the important metrics. "Hits" doesnt really cut it if your differentiation is analytics.
Anywho, Good luck. I think if you clean up the design some, that itself will make the service a lot more attractive/usable and you will see increased activity. Once you get some traction you'll be able to really drive home the rest.
Not validating is not bad. It's not essential either. Take google.com for example. And the delicious tags are not "stolen" but are the delicious.com badge.
Closing accounts: didn't think of that, but easy enough to add.
Editing and deleting cligs is coming.
Skip to content link is for mobile users. A proper mobile-optimized layout is coming that will be automatically used if a mobile UA is detected and this is a temporary measure. As a mobile net user, I find such links very helpful.
But I think you're missing something important here. You say "Right now your solution is not only replicating them on some level, but it does so in an inferior way." Tinyurl and is.gd do not offer anywhere near the service Cligs does in terms of analytics. I don't want to belittle them but they don't have top contend with user accounts and layout out a ton of data in a sensible way. So the current design of Cligs doesn't work but that's because it needs to do a lot more.
Thanks again.