Dresssed: Beautiful Themes built on bootstrap for your Rails App

http://dresssed.com

by mgrouchy • 14 years ago

76 41 14 years ago

dresssed.com

impostervt• 14 years ago

Love the idea.

Small issue - when I mouse over the Buy Now button, the popup/hover box shows up for about a second, then disappears.

macournoyer8• 14 years ago

Creator of the project here. Thx :) What browser are you on?

jpsirois• 14 years ago

I’m having this issues too with the current Google Chrome Stable 19.0.1084.56

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I'm honestly surprised we've not seen more of these. Bootstrap is great, it's a good set of nice tools to get you going and then a truly creative designer can take it where it needs to go.

Look forward to seeing more themes appear!

sgdesign2• 14 years ago

I think the reason there aren't more themes is the sheer quantity of work involved in styling all the bootstrap elements.

monfresh• 14 years ago

Here's another one with a similar price point: https://railsthemes.com/

tucson3• 14 years ago

I am looking for a way to sell ready-made websites to small businesses. Does anybody know of a solution that would take basic infos (company name, some presentation text) and produce a nicely designed (such as those themes) website ?

jamesbritt• 14 years ago

Webby or nanoc or some other static-site generator tool?

sneak• 14 years ago

These are not optimized for iPad3 (retina).

drharris4• 14 years ago

Definitely beautiful, but the price point seems a bit strange. It definitely surpasses ThemeForest territory, but it's still built on an existing framework and has that "cookie-cutter" vibe to it. Considering a few hundred more bucks will get you a completely custom Bootstrap theme on oDesk, I wonder about the target demographic for something like this.

I think the killer app for this will be a bootstrap theme where a few easy parameters (so easy your grandma can do it!) can dramatically change the look and feel to make something actually feel unique. If that is possible, I can really see this taking off.

sgdesign2• 14 years ago

I'd be very curious to see what kind of custom theme you can get for a couple dollars...

drharris4• 14 years ago

For a couple dollars? Probably nothing at all. I've been outsourcing custom bootstrap themes similar to this (perhaps slightly less polished, but completely custom to the product) for around $400-500 for 4-5 different page styles and all elements (tables, forms, jquery widgets). Some are even partially responsive.

macournoyer8• 14 years ago

Creator of Dresssed here.

You can get much cheaper themes specifically for Bootstrap here: https://wrapbootstrap.com/.

But what I've noticed is that every theme based on Bootstrap is incomplete. Focus of my themes is to provide everything you need to build an app. Re-branding every component was a lot of work and trying to make them not look like Bootstrap was even more work.

tucson3• 14 years ago

I applaud your service, but as a potential customer, I need something easier to use to provide websites on demand. Just thought this could be interesting for you to know.

I have more than 500 hits per month, all small businesses who want to create a "website". For many a simple bootstrap theme would do... with very little parametrization.

drharris4• 14 years ago

Please don't misunderstand my comment for a lack of excitement about this domain. I'm going to keep a close watch on this to see where it goes. Absolutely agree about the state of Bootstrap themes, which is why I tend to go pure custom with outsourcing. One suggestion I would have is to really hit hard about how yours stand out. Clearly, they are well designed, but someone who would be a buyer at that price point (doesn't need custom, but needs something nice and flexible) may not be educated enough to know why they should choose yours over the cookie-cutter $30 theme. The custom form and tables are particularly nice, but they are buried in the demo. I've spent a lot of time digging through bootstrap themes, and it took me awhile to figure out what made this one more compelling; less experienced users will surely have the same issue.

Good luck though; this is definitely an interesting space and I think you'll get some good results over time.

tucson3• 14 years ago

"I think the killer app for this will be a bootstrap theme where a few easy parameters (so easy your grandma can do it!)"

Absolutely agree. I have customers but don't have the skills to automate website creations. We need this gap bridged.

Give me an API to build a website based on simple parameters: [ domain name, title, presentation text ]. (for example)

pbreit• 14 years ago

I'm surprised ThemeForrest hasn't done much yet around Bootstrap. Some of the designers have started using it but I would have expected a full-fledged category or section by now.

soulclap2• 14 years ago

I am hoping that Bootstrap will become a standard base for most themes as well. Just makes sense.

ericingram• 14 years ago

Very nice looking theme, and a good idea.

It makes me think though, so much effort lately is going into "dressing" UI and very little attention seems to be paid to improving UI structure. The old list - page hop - view pattern is feeling pretty out dated. Oh well.

benjaminwootton• 14 years ago

Is this sort of stuff turning application development into a commodity?

You can spin up a Rails app, Bootstrap it, and them theme it off the shelf with about 30 minutes work nowadays. 10 minutes later you can have it running on a PAAS such as Heroku.

Each of those jobs would have taken a number of different specialists many days in development, design, and sys admin work just a few years ago.

The average simple CRUD SAAS app that is presented here is such a low barrier to entry and becoming increasingly so.

efsavage2• 14 years ago

Yes? This is good thing, right?

taylonr2• 14 years ago

It depends. Is it good that I don't need to know how to get an Apache server on a *NIX box up and running just so I can play with Ruby? Absolutely.

Is it good that even though I suck as UI design & colors, I can see something I like, drop a little cash and deploy it? Again absolutely.

Is it good that it's now super easy to write a CRUD app that is nothing more than a digitized form? I'm not sold here.

I get the allure, and I take advantage of these options as much as possible. But what I want to see is software helping solve a problem. If all you're doing is digitizing a form, I'm not convinced you've really solved a problem.

4qbomb• 14 years ago

Not the Creator of Dressed here.

The point of Bootstrap is to make it "so easy your grandmother can do it" so why would I pay $149 for your layouts when inevitably it's going to require some form of customization you haven't thought of. Great job at taking advantage of the internet sheep, I will give you that.

macournoyer8• 14 years ago

Your grandmother knows HTML & CSS?

kristofferR2• 14 years ago

Is it retina/high-resolution ready?

dwynings• 14 years ago

Preview is broken (http://dresssed.com/themes/gimlet/preview)

  "The page you were looking for doesn't exist.
   You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved."

And you're missing a Favicon.

Jake2322• 14 years ago

Also experiencing this.

macournoyer8• 14 years ago

Ooops! It's back.

siavosh• 14 years ago

It's weird, I pressed the close on the preview video, but the audio keeps going...

Jake2322• 14 years ago

Have you considered integrating with the GitHub API, and adding customers details to the repo upon purchase? (if they want).

That way, it makes it easier for customers to submit bugs to you, talk about suggestions, and even provide their own improvements if necessary.

HackerEngine wrote about doing this here: http://blog.hackerengine.com/

jray• 14 years ago

Great theme !

Please add support to django framework.

http://www.djangoproject.com

soulclap2• 14 years ago

Good to finally see a nice theme on top of Bootstrap that actually changes things to make it look individual, as expected from a quality site, while keeping the good parts that you initially picked Bootstrap for. Thumbs up for the theme and the business idea!

Not everyone is using Rails though and even the Rails coders might want to use other plugins, are you going to offer themes without all the Rails customization as well?

macournoyer8• 14 years ago

Yes! At some point I hope to offer non-Rails versions of the themes. But the focus now is to make more themes.

Dresssed: Beautiful Themes built on bootstrap for your Rails App

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