We are very excited to have finally launched our new website design after almost a full year in development! You’ll see things are looking pretty spiffy around here and it’s all been completely re-coded from the ground up. Additionally, we also just launched our plugin site over at Mint Plugins – which is built entirely by using MP Stacks.

Psst! Check out the best WordPress Themes for Launching a new Product!

Admittedly, I was a little but shy to the idea of re-doing our entire website at first because I knew what a large undertaking it would be.  To completely re-design, re-create, and move everything and everyone over to a new design and code base was a huge learning experience, for sure. And it has helped us grow as not only as a business, but also as WordPresser’s in general by leaps and bounds.

A few of our goals with the new website were to make it faster, easier to navigate for users, and easier for us to manage/update. Most of all, we wanted to help our clients get to know us better. If you take a gander around the site I think you’ll get a pretty good idea of who we are and what we do as a company.

The bulk of what makes this version so great is its foundation – which consists of two main parts. The first is the cart system – which is running on the Easy Digital Downloads plugin by Pippin Williamson. It handles everything from the cart, to the checkout, to the delivery of files, to the new Members Lounge – which we think you will appreciate very much! Easy Digital Downloads is the most solid plugin I have ever had the privilege of using and I highly recommend trying it if you are creating a digital download related website. That and Pippin is one of the most helpful dudes around! I’ll be doing a full blog about Easy Digital Downloads soon.

The second part would be WordPress – which truly is the most amazing content management system out there today. We are really thankful to be a part of such an awesome community. And if you aren’t using WordPress for your website – I definitely recommend you put it in your plans because it gets better with every release.

I also want to highlight some of the harder parts about doing this re-launch. Probably the hardest was trying to keep consistently releasing content and themes that were useful to our customers while simultaneously working on our own website – and all the while answering support tickets as well. It can also feel like it is taking a very long time to complete – almost like it may never happen. If you’re in the middle of a project like that, I would say keep going even when you feel like you’ll never finish, cause if you stop – well that’s the only way you won’t finish. Haha. Eventually if you keep working hard when you can find the time, it does come to a point where you feel like you’re ready to launch. And it’s a pretty good feeling that gets better knowing we’ll be able to help more people get their own projects off the ground.

We are excited to get back to making themes and plugins full-steam – because that’s really what we’re here to do. And we feel good about the fact that our website has the ability to facilitate that much better as well.

As always, if you have any questions or need help you can contact us at support@mintthemes.com – or leave us some thoughts in the comments below.

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Are you looking to launch your own website? Great! It’s easier than you think. The first thing you’ll need is a place for your website to “live”. This is called “web hosting” and there are a lot of companies that offer it at differing prices and values – but there are 2 main groups:

• “Shared Hosting” – Inexpensive web hosting for small/new websites.
• “Dedicated Hosting” – More expensive hosting for larger websites.

Shared, inexpensive web hosts will work for most new websites. However, there is something that they do that is a little bit sneaky: they often claim to give you “unlimited” space for your files to sit – and “unlimited” bandwidth (which is how many people can visit your site per month). Nothing in life is TRULY unlimited though – and this is really a clever marketing ploy they will tell you to get you to sign up – while in the fine print (which none of us actually read), they put a lot of limitations on you.

So are inexpensive web hosts evil? No. They are usually the best option for brand new websites and I definitely recommend them to many people getting started. You just need to be aware that there is no such thing as “unlimited” and if you see your website starting to grow a lot, you’ll eventually want to transition to a more expensive, “dedicated” host before they shut your hosting account down (I have seen this happen to friends and it isn’t very fun – so be sure to keep an eye on your growth using Google Analytics).

Dedicated hosts are able to handle high amounts of traffic – and vary a lot. I won’t get into dedicated hosting too much here because this post is targeted at “new website” launches. If your website has grown to the point of needing to move to “dedicated” or you’re just not sure, feel free to send us an email to support@mintplugins.com with your questions.

Now you’ll want to install WordPress – which is the best website managment system on the internet by far – and powers over 20% of ENTIRE internet! It’s totally free to set up – and most web hosts will install WordPress on your hosting for you free-of-charge.

Finally, I recommend installing our free page building plugin for WordPress called “MP Stacks”. It will allow you to really get your website’s pages EXACTLY how you want them to look. To learn more about MP Stacks, click here.