I just finished re-doing our main site for Highview Apps, a software company I started with a friend of mine that makes Shopify apps. We've been thinking of re-doing the site for some time now and I was finally able to allocate a couple of days to work on it.

Initially, we just wanted to have a company site up and running quickly so we just picked a very simple one-page, free Bootstrap 3 agency template. But as we started to take things more seriously (we now have 3 apps, my co-founder just released our third app, EZ Importer, to beta a few days ago) we had to customize it a bit and added a blog and documentation section. The free template we were using, however, didn't work so well for these pages as it wasn't really designed for these types of content. The styling just didn't look right.

Since we're not designers ourselves, we just purchased a theme from a marketplace that focuses on Bootstrap themes and templates, wrapbootstrap.com. It's pretty amazing how you can make really good-looking sites now with just some basic knowledge of Bootstrap, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Most of them are priced between $10-$20 which is really nothing considering the amount of time it saves us. You can find themes and templates for all kinds of sites you can think of: agency sites, SaaS apps, blogs, e-commerce, portfolios, job boards, etc. It's really great for developers like us who don't have design skills.

We're also at a point now that we want to do more content marketing. So far, our apps have been growing steadily with very minimal marketing. We started tracking our conversions and found out that a blog post I wrote on this site actually ranked quite well on Google for one of our target keywords and it's getting us some of our signups. We do experiment with paid ads as well but found it quite surprising that my one blog post is actually getting us more signups than Google AdWords, even though it's bringing much more traffic to our app store page.

Content marketing is really more of a long-term plan. We don't expect it to really pay off until much later but it's good to get started now. But the first step is to make sure that our blog/article pages look nice and easy to read to not turn users off.

Another thing that we found talking to customers is a lot of them actually read the documentation first before sending us an email. We actually get very few support emails and when we get emails about how to do something, the customers will actually mention they couldn't find it in the documentation. So we've been updating our docs constantly as well and this new re-design will help our users find the information they need faster which saves both us and them time.