Show HN: Appsites – Beautiful websites for mobile apps in minutes | Hacker News Reader

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

appsites.com

60 pointsryanmerket33 comments

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.

Honest question: Why not us a Wordpress template?

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

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!

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.

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=...

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

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

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

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

wow, impressed

Thank you for your good word :)

What do these look like live? have an example?

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

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)

It's our first customer. Thanks for the feedback, we'll take a look.

I don't have a retina display, but the graphics are blurry here as well.

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

We have 3 themes, but most are scroll heavy (parallax). We're working hard on launching more themes, we'll definitely keep a compact theme in mind. Thanks for the feedback.

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

Seeing the same. Chrome 36.

Should be up now.

We got hit hard with HN homepage and ProductHunt homepage at the same time. Should be up now.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Good catch, we'll fix this today.

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

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?

Userlytics, Mixpanel, maybe?

Cool! You should include a landscape theme (game)

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

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