
Dresssed: Beautiful Themes built on bootstrap for your Rails App - mgrouchy
http://dresssed.com
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drharris
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.

~~~
macournoyer
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.

~~~
drharris
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.

~~~
macournoyer
Very good point! You are totally right. I did hit hard about those points in
the emails I sent before launch and they have been very successful. But not on
the site yet. Will do that. Thanks for the suggestion.

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benjaminwootton
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.

~~~
efsavage
Yes? This is good thing, right?

~~~
taylonr
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.

~~~
joelhooks
The entire internet is a CRUD app filled with digitized forms. It is nice not
to have to think about that, and instead think about workflows and affordances
that help people get stuff done. Making this basic crud easier allows more
brain space for the more interesting problems to solve.

~~~
taylonr
True, my concern is more that people will just stop with the CRUD app.

Geocities did some good for letting people having their own page. But the HTML
was horrendous, and left many thinking they're doing amazing stuff. I don't
really want to see that repeated.

The problem, however, is at the developer level and not the tool level, I
suppose.

~~~
efsavage
I wouldn't worry about people "stopping". As long as companies have use-it-or-
lose-it budgets, they'll find a way to spend the money somewhere.

And as for geocities, untrained people putting content out there for the rest
of the world to see was pretty amazing stuff at the time, even without
semantic web concepts in place.

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soulclap
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?

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

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Jake232
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/>

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4qbomb
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.

~~~
macournoyer
Your grandmother knows HTML & CSS?

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dwynings
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.

~~~
Jake232
Also experiencing this.

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ericingram
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.

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tucson
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 ?

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

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nicholassmith
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!

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

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sneak
These are not optimized for iPad3 (retina).

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impostervt
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.

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

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

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macournoyer
Should be fixed now, thx!

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jray
Great theme !

Please add support to django framework.

<http://www.djangoproject.com>

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

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kristofferR
Is it retina/high-resolution ready?

