Creating a website for your iPhone App using WordPress themes #iphonedev
Since I submitted my new iPhone app, Contact Notes, I wanted to create a basic website to promote it. My previous experience with Contacts Journal had taught me that having a good website for your app is important. I had initially used Intuit’s drag-and-drop website designer to make something really ugly myself, just because I didn’t want to invest time and energy into it. Later on, I had the website professionally designed, payed about a $1,000, and was happy with the results. I was able to charge a higher price for both the iPhone and iPad apps. A well-designed website gives your app an air of credibility that is very important if you want to charge more than a $0.99.
Since Contact Notes is a much simpler app, I wanted to find a cheaper solution that would still look authentic. I stumbled upon this free WordPress theme from www.rawapps.com that looked promising. I didn’t have much clue about how WordPress worked, so I did some research.
There’s not much to it; you need a hosted website that supports WordPress installation. There are tons of options out there, but I went with godaddy.com. I bought the domain + basic hosting for a year for only $50. It installed WP by default. The site was up and active in about 30 minutes. You can then go to the WordPress admin and customize your site with your own text and images. The basic WordPress theme is nice, but to extend it, you need to access the Content File Manager, access the wp-content/themes folder, and drop in the zip file for the theme you want to install. Then use the File Manager to unarchive the theme, and it does the setup work for you (your milage may vary on a different hosting setup). All that was left to do was go to the Appearances tab in the WordPress admin interface, and click on Activate on the new theme.
A new tab came up for RawApps, in which I could fill out all the information about title, logo, description, pricing, upload screenshots etc. After filling out all the data, viola … your app website is ready! Here’s what mine looks like right now:
Meh. The results are OK, not that impressive. I got a bunch of errors when editing the theme (which were easy to fix), but it really lacks in customization options. After looking around, I came across a couple of other themes that show more polish:
Theme 1 ($65 for one-time use)
Theme 2 ($20)
I am seriously considering upgrading to one of these themes soon.
One interesting option I also stumbled upon was using DropBox as your website host and using iWeb (on the Mac) to edit your website! This YouTube tutorial gives more details, but basically, you can use iWeb to make your website, save it “locally” into your DropBox folder, use the URL that DropBox gives your folder, and rename it using this service: dot.tk. You can get a free domain name with the .tk extension, or pay to have a .com domain. But you can essentially host your website for free, and let DropBox worry about availability. I didn’t find any iPhone app related theme for iWeb so I didn’t go down this route, but it might be useful for someone.
