Getting customers to notice and discover your Windows Store apps is hard, but you can reach users who aren’t inside the Windows Store using simple websites designed to promote your apps.
In addition, if your Windows Store app requires access to the Internet you are required by Windows Store policy to publish and link to a privacy policy hosted online (section 4.1.1.)
We decided to make life a little easier for Windows Store developers and built MetroAppSite – a fully responsive Metro-style website that uses Twitter Bootstrap and other standard frameworks to help developers promote their Windows Store apps.
And like most of our customers, we’re a .NET shop, so we built an ASP.NET MVC4 version of MetroAppSite too!
Features
Here are some of the great features that you get with MetroAppSite:
Metro theming and branding
Give your promotional website the same Metro look-and-feel that your users experience when they download your app from the Windows Store.
We even include a Microsoft Surface screenshot carousel for you to use to show off your Windows Store app’s look-and-feel.
MetroAppSite uses BootMetro and Twitter Bootstrap to give Windows Store developers an easy-to-modify, brandable template they can use to their own ends.
Fully responsive and touch/mobile-friendly
MetroAppSite’s CSS and design is fully responsive and touch-optimized out of the box. It looks great in full-sized web browsers and on mobile devices too!
Integrates seamlessly with third party services like Google Analytics and UserVoice
Unfortunately there isn’t a MarkedUp Analytics for websites yet, but in the meantime we made it dead-simple to integrate MetroAppSite with Google Analytics so you can measure your pageviews and visitors.
Additionally, we added hooks to integrate UserVoice directly into your app’s site so you can collect feedback and support tickets from users easily and seamlessly. UserVoice is what we used for our customer support at MarkedUp and we’ve had a great experience with it!
Templated privacy policy in order to make it easy for you to satisfy Windows Store certification requirements
Writing privacy policies can be a pain, so we made it easy for you to generate a privacy policy for your app using PrivacyChoice.org. You can paste these right into MetroAppSite and meet Windows Store certification requirements easily and thoroughly.
Demo Sites
We created some simple MetroAppSite deployments for you so can see what they look like in production:
Download
MetroAppSite is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and is free for you to use in commercial or non-commercial projects.
Contribution
We happily accept pull requests via Github.
[...] MetroAppSite: Free, Open Source Metro-Style Website Templates for Your Windows Store Apps (Aaron Stannard) [...]
[...] which is also an analytics platform for Windows 8 and RT apps, has now launched what it calls MetroAppSite, and as you can see in the example above, it looks a lot better than Microsoft’s own Windows [...]
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