Show HN: Appsites – Beautiful websites for mobile apps in minutes

http://appsites.com

by ryanmerket • 12 years ago

60 33 12 years ago

appsites.com

thomasknoll• 12 years ago

What do these look like live? have an example?

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Yes, check out http://chow.appsites.com

MaxGabriel• 12 years ago

I'm not sure if this is a real or example site, but if an example site it's probably worth getting retina graphics for it (it's very noticeable on an iPhone).

The image alignment also seems weird. There's a white border on the top background image, after which the images are right aligned (hard to describe; just looks like a bug to me)

jamesbritt• 12 years ago

That's a lot of scrolling. Are there other designs that are more compact?

PanMan• 12 years ago

Is this example removed? Shows just the main page here...

GotAnyMegadeth• 12 years ago

It would be cool to have a Gallery link on the homepage, or something similar

underwater• 12 years ago

Cool concept but your landing page spends too much time telling me what I'll get and not why I'd want it.

I tried out the editor by pasting a random app link. It looks pretty neat but took forever to load. You could also short circuit the reloading when I cancel out of an edit panel. And fix the settings popup so that it can be dismissed when viewed in small browser windows.

jbverschoor• 12 years ago

Cool! You should include a landscape theme (game)

philbarr2• 12 years ago

It seems to be down at the moment as I keep getting the "We'll be right back!" message. Possibly the HN effect?

Anyway - that aside this is an absolutely brilliant idea and fixes a real pain point for me. After spending so long on the app that I've started to hate it, doing all the screenshots, videos, etc. is bad enough - but then you have to do the website as well and it just makes you feel like - "urgh, really? CSS mangling time? Blergh." I would easily pay some of my hard earned indie cash to just have it done for me. Some thoughts:

- I'm going to want to integrate whatever site you create into my own website, so I just want to download whatever you have and throw it into a div container and have it work. Which means there shouldn't be any/many dependencies on CSS frameworks / JavaScript etc. It should be clean.

- If I'm going to give you my cash I'm going to want to be able to choose from a LOT of different themes so that I can differentiate my app from all the others out there. I don't mind doing some of the simple customization myself (colours, text, etc.). I'm not going to want to pay each time if all it comes down to is changing the logo / picture / text when I could easily do that myself.

- I don't know how you plan to monetize, but I wouldn't pay monthly for this. I just don't churn out apps fast enough (other people might want to though, of course). But I would be prepared to pay a fair bit each time if it looks good enough. I'm thinking £5 for the simple demo shown (chow.appsites.com), up to £25 for something like http://staticapp.co/ - with all the fancy animations and the like.

Anyway - hope it works out and you do well.

vvvv• 12 years ago

Honest question: Why not us a Wordpress template?

philbarr2• 12 years ago

Because that would mean I'd have to use Wordpress. I still want to have enough control to change what I want to.

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Yea, we got on Product Hunt and HackerNews at the same time. Ouch.

Thanks for the positive feedback!

1) This is a great idea. We'll definitely chat about it.

2) More themes is our top priority. We built the platform in such a way that theming is super easy.

3) Right now it's free if you don't mind yourcname.appsites.com. If you want to use your own domain, the plans start at $9/mo per app. Or $39/mo for 5 apps.

Really really appreciate the feedback!

jnye131• 12 years ago

Definitely something I'd be interested in also, but sadly seems to be struggling with the load.

supercoder• 12 years ago

Doesn't seem to work right now, but reminds me of how app.io started. They basically created websites for your apps automatically but then I think found the demand wasn't that great and pivoted to the realtime demo idea.

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

There's actually been quite a few VC backed companies try this model: App.net and App.io come to mind. The beautiful thing about Appsites is that we won't be taking money -- from anyone. So we don't have the same pressure to be a $100M to business. We're perfectly content being a $100k a year business. We're completely bootstrapped and intend to stay that way. So as long as we're pulling a profit, we intend to keep our customer's websites running.

junto2• 12 years ago

You should have a link to a demo customer, so we can see what the output looks like.

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Thanks, we just put that in todo list last night. Try this: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dragon-story/id513474544?mt=...

grimtrigger• 12 years ago

I was actually of just thinking of building something like this, ha. I like the idea.

Under the "enter your appstore link" you should have a default that the user can try. I don't have an app link but I'd still lie to see some output.

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Thanks, we just put this in the roadmap last night :)

Try any URL to test it out. Here is one: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dragon-story/id513474544?mt=...

webmaven2• 12 years ago

Very interesting. Does it include A/B testing functionality, or can you integrate 3rd-party analytics and testing KISSMetrics, Optimizely, etc.?

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Optimizely is next on our list of integrations to support. Right now we support Google Analytics, but it's pretty trivial to add more. Any other services you think we should support?

webmaven2• 12 years ago

Userlytics, Mixpanel, maybe?

montekaka2• 12 years ago

Nice, I built something like this before too, but with much few feature.

http://myapppage.herokuapp.com/demo?appID=471966214

sogen• 12 years ago

wow, impressed

montekaka2• 12 years ago

Thank you for your good word :)

edlea• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, it only seems to work for apps that are on the US app store. It doesn't create a page for apps that are, say, only in the UK app store.

ryanmerket11• 12 years ago

Good catch, we'll fix this today.

Show HN: Appsites – Beautiful websites for mobile apps in minutes

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