Redesigned Slice 'n Dice site launched

We’ve just launched our redesigned site for Slice ‘n Dice with new pricing, new services, and live chat! If you’re in need of xhtml/css coding, check out Slice ‘n Dice.

Gooey Templates Featured on CSSVault

Thanks to CSSVault for featuring our new site, GooeyTemplates.com!

How we built GooeyTemplates: Part 1 - The services behind GooeyTemplates.com

Welcome to the first part in a series of posts about how we built Gooey Templates.

Goal

Our biggest goal when setting up the promotional site for Gooey Templates was to put something together we could launch quickly and inexpensively. Any time you’re building a website or application, you really have 3 options: custom built software, off the shelf software, or 3rd party services. We decided to go the route of 3rd party services. This made it much quicker and cheaper to launch our promotional site.

Hosting

For hosting the static part of our site, we used Media Temple hosting, on their GridServer. This gives us plenty of bandwidth, great performance, and very good reliability. The only part of the site not hosted on Media Temple, is the shopping cart section.

Shopping Cart / File Delivery

For the shopping cart and file delivery, we decided upon a combination of Shopify and Fetch. We considered using Magento Commerce (a new open source ecommerce app that looks really nice). However, the Shopify/Fetch combo gave us several advantages over Magento.

With Shopify, they handle the setup and security of everything. This meant, we didn’t have to setup a database, install software, or purchase an SSL Certificate – which saved us many hours of work.

We also didn’t have to worry about how to deliver our digital files, since Fetch automatically syncs with Shopify to take care of any orders that come in. All we had to do was setup our Fetch account, provide our Shopify address, and upload our digital files to Fetch. Whenever an order comes in, Fetch automatically sends an email to our customer with a download link. Delivery of digital files just doesn’t get any easier than with Fetch. If you’re looking for an easy to use digital file delivery system, definitely check it out.

Payment

After considering several payment options, including Authorize.net, Google Checkout, and Paypal Pro, we finally settled on PayPal. It was easy to setup, but it also allowed us to seamlessly integrate credit card payments with Shopify. The other options didn’t allow us to do both of these things.

Stats

For our statistics needs, we originally decided to go with Google Analytics. It’s a full featured, free service that gives a lot of detail about traffic to your site. However, after a few hours, we quickly realized we wanted more up to date information. So, we opted to add Mint for our real-time stats addiction!

Email Updates

Finally for keeping customers up to date on news about Gooey Templates, we opted to use MailBuild. It’s simple to setup and there are no monthly fees (they only charge to send out emails), so that worked especially well.

Stay tuned for future posts in the “How we built Gooey Templates” series. Make sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed so you don’t miss it.

The coolest desk I've seen in awhile

I just found a very cool desk called MILK. The fish tank is so very nice!

Announcing Gooey Templates - Smart Web App UI Templates

Yesterday we launched Gooey Templates which allow you to quickly build an interface for your web app. Each Gooey Template includes an xhtml/css layout, prebuilt forms, tables, buttons, and styles for most html elements.

The idea came from our frustration of building small web apps for clients and not having the budget to wrap it in a nice GUI (or Gooey :). It seemed like the GUI always got the short end of the stick, but that’s the first thing a client sees when they look at their app. A Gooey Template can give you a big head start in developing your app.

Check out the templates here.

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