Often times when we talk about our friends at Silicon Prairie News we talk about our friend Jeff Slobotski, as the “Chief Community Builder” Slobotski is often times the face of SPN. His co-founder, equally as vested in the Silicon Prairie region, Dusty Davidson, is often times very busy building something. Well after six months in beta his latest “something” is now launching, and it’s a relief to many designers reliant on the WordPress platform.
Davidson along with partners Rick Knudtson and Tony Noecker have launched “FlyWheel”. The team, which Davidson calls a “…dream team of founders” has launched a “premium” WordPress hosting platform built for designers. “We’re re-imagining what it means for designers to host and launch sites on WordPress, and for them to collaborate with customers and other designers and developers. ” Davidson told us an in email.
One of the things that sets FlyWheel apart from other hosting platforms is that they strictly WordPress. “All we do is WordPress, our servers are tunes specifically for WordPress, ultrasecure and have top performance” Davidson said in a statement. That makes “light speed’ normal speed for designers that use FlyWheel for their sites.
FlyWheel allows design firms to launch demo sites for free and then easily transfer files to a client site to “go live”, a feature which Elevate’s Jake Stutzman, finds particularly useful. FlyWheel will allow a webspace for actual collaboration rather than having to send stills back and forth through collaboration platforms like BaseCamp.
To that end, FlyWheel has made it very easy for a designer to grant access to their site without having to send usernames and passwords back and forth through email, which may open up a client to a designers entire portfolio.
FlyWheel also caters to designers by cutting out a lot of the technical jargon found with hosting companies. Even with a technical background Knudston told Silicon Prairie News “I joke … what are acronyms like CGI? Or what version of PHP is it running? Or things like SSH access,” which is one of the reasons he came up with the idea for FlyWheel.
“The problem that we’re trying to solve is specific to web designers and agencies who manage large numbers of sites,” Davidson said. “Somebody like (Omaha design firm) Grain & Mortar will design 30 WordPress sites a year, and they need to manage those … they have to log into 30 different hosting accounts, or they have to remember passwords and user names or they have to do things that make managing that many sites and launching sites in that manner very difficult for them.”
FlyWheel also features an integrated management tool that allows design agencies to quickly get an overview of all of their WordPress projects and quickly login to a clients site, share credentials with a client or even bill a client for their FlyWheel hosting.
You can check out FlyWheel now at getflywheel.com