Flexilivre.com : result of one year working on Flex/Php/Mysql

I am used to only talk about IT stuff here related to Flex, HTML, Mysql, etc.. But this time I would like to talk about the result of using those technologies : flexilivre.com

First when I started this blog, I was creating a website which doesn’t exist anymore: wegook.com. It was an online travel guide service. The idea was great, the IT challenge wasn’t that big, but the amount of touristic information required was too huge…

So after one year and a half and I stopped working on wegook.com, no more money to invest. And I started thinking about a new project to work on. Being a world traveler, I had to print at least one time a book with pics about my travels. And every time I tried to do so, I was so disappointed. Almost all websites will make you download software, and install it on your computer. The downloaded software looked like old IT stuff.. Really surprising. The internet technologies are so developed, and companies keep asking to their customers to use old IT.

So very quickly I decided to dig on that, and try to find out if it could be possible to compete on this market. With a friend we met a few printing companies, and we realized that prices given to us were so low that we could easily compete the biggest websites!

It took me 2 months to develop the first version on my website : flexilivre.com. By using Flex, I was able to build so quickly a very interactive web interface for creating picture book on a web page. Then with JQuery/HTML/CSS, I created to rest of the website: ordering, contact form, etc.. This was even easier; it took less than 2weeks. And all of that used a Mysql database.

This project has been a real IT challenge so far. Every day, I try to find a solution to do better than our competitors. And by using FLEX it’s just so easy.

At this time, Flexilivre.com is one year and 3months old. It makes good money. We are only two people managing this new company. So we can propose the best prices to our customers, in fact at this day our books are the cheapest in France. The printing company we are working with believes in us. So they are very reactive, they print any book we send to them within 48h. So our customers receive their book within 3 to 4days after ordering. It makes us the fastest on the french market.