The do-it-yourself website space is so crowded right now that it’s amazing to see anyone launch a product and cut through the noise. Still, we were captivated by the simplicity and design of Flavors.me. Similar to Card.ly, instead of forcing you to use Facebook, LinkedIn or your neglected blog to represent you, Flavors lets you build a basic vanity site in less than 10 minutes. As of this evening non-designers will have a chance to revel in their newly found web sex appeal.
Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.
ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Jonathan Marcus to get an early look at the service. The basic premise is that Flavors lets you produce a well-designed springboard to portfolio pieces, current work and profiles. Users add links, edit fonts and colors, and upload a background photo. Rather than fiddling with cascading style sheets or modifying blog templates, this service offers a fast and easy way to create an elegant web presence.
Under the banner of Hii Def Inc. internet incubator, brothers Jonathan and David Marcus and former Vimeo design lead Jack Zerby created Flavors as just one of three companies to launch in 2009. Prior to Flavors.me, the group produced online sneaker shop Superkix. As a hybrid of both Flavors and Superkix, the team will soon release an online storefront tool by the name of Goodsie.
Says Jonathan Marcus, ” We wanted to sell Superkix t-shirts online but weren’t satisfied with Yahoo Stores, Shopify or BigCartel and realized there were enough re-usable elements from Flavors to make it feasible to build in parallel.”
While Superkix is an obvious revenue generator as a retail storefront, the group plans on offering a domain redirect feature to Flavors in mid-December as well as a yearly subscription fee after a 30-day trial. Upon launch, Goodsie will be available with a monthly subscription.
Says Marcus, “Both [services] will dramatically reduce the cost and complexity associated with maintaining a web presence. Any other monetization model such as advertising would introduce competing and distracting interests.”
Users can test Flavors at flavors.me by using the invite code readwriteweb. You may want to check out the company’s design gallery here. For those interested in a fuller feature set check out ReadWriteWeb’s Tools for Codeless Website Creation.
