I've recently started a new website to create free gift certificates. The idea is pretty simple, someone is looking for a personal or business gift certificate template. They find my site and use the online tool to make a gift certificate for free. In exchange I have some basic ads, hopefully it would make it worthwhile for me overtime. The start up costs are minimal.
I'm currently offering general business gift certificates, birthday, Christmas, Halloween, Valentines, Easter, golf, coffee and a few others. Planning to expand into providing spa and massage gift certificates as it seems quite a few people are looking for them.
The experience in creating a new type of website/service is quite interesting and I'm learning quickly. I've had plenty of HTML and CSS experience, making basic personal websites. Even the theme for this blog is custom made through some basic CSS editing. But I wasn't familiar with HTML5 in particular HTML5 canvas and jquery. So I've had to check plenty of web resources, and I'm surprised how powerful some of more modern tools are. For example my gift template website uses HTML5 canvas and a little jquery to fill in the information for the gift certificates, everything is done client side which makes it a very low resource site. I've would have never imagined a decade ago that such functionality was possible without a database and some heavy server side scripts for image editing. I'm not sure if I simply didn't look into it, or if it really was the case. Either way it's easier now to create a web service with some simple code, instead of a static website.
If my site has any type of success I'll write a follow up, maybe a general guide on what I did right or wrong. For now I'm trying to optimize it and provide the best service I can. Thanks for reading.
