PressClub is a print on demand service for schools and organisations to design and print newspapers, magazines, and yearbooks.
PressClub is a print on demand service for schools and organisations to design and print newspapers, magazines, and yearbooks.
PressClub enables school children to design newspapers and magazines with simple to use, tried and tested, colourful design templates. A feature rich digital tool includes a library of artwork and is accessible via the PressClub website.
Schools are able to make free PDFs of children's designs. They can use them to send to parents, load onto websites or to print at home or in school. They can print designs for an additional cost in workshops or by simply pressing the ‘send to print’ button. PressClub offers competitive prices, small print runs and uses the latest printing techniques to make high quality products.
To create PressClub we used the Printbox ecommerce platform. Printbox is a non-traditional ecommerce platform developed to deal with the complexity of the photo printing business. Printbox provides a digital photo book publishing tool that enables users to create a range of products using highly customizable templates.
Schools can subscribe for as little as £50 a year. This gives the whole school access to the pre-made and fully customisable templates and a whole library of artwork. The subscription enables schools to make unlimited free PDFs or send copies to print.
Printbox provides a store specifically designed for selling print on demand products. The store makes pricing administration more effective for a print on demand business. Managing product attributes and prices for each product type is efficient and fast.
We integrated PressClub with Stripe in order to manage subscription and print on demand payments. Stripe's software and APIs are used by millions of companies of all kinds, from small startups to big corporations. Stripe is used to collect payments, send payouts, and manage online presence.
PressClub has been developed as a responsive web application rather than a mobile app deployed to stores. This is because it is more accessible for schools, flexible and cost-effective to maintain.
The web application was developed with Remix - a full stack web framework. Remix enables web developers to deliver a slick and resilient user experience at speed. It is focused on web standards and modern web app UX which helps developers build better websites.
We used Supabase for Authentication, Authorisation and database. Supabase is a cost-effective backend as a service solution that we have been using for a number of years. To find out more about Supabase read our article which compares Supabase with AWS amplify.
The PressClub web application is hosted on Vercel - a cost-effective cloud platform. Vercel allows developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require minimal maintenance. Using Vercel allowed us to easily connect our GitHub repository and automatically deploy. We used the main branch as production. Every time a pull request is made to that branch, Vercel will create a unique deployment. This allows us to view the changes in a preview environment before merging.
In addition to hosting the front end with Vercel, we used Vercel Serverless Functions. Vercel Serverless Functions allow code to run on demand without managing infrastructure, provision servers, or upgrade hardware. We use serverless functions to schedule periodic tasks and respond to Printbox webhooks.
We used Sendgrid for sending email notifications. SendGrid delivers transactional and marketing emails through the world's largest cloud-based email delivery platform.
PressClub required a marketing website for the promotion of the print on demand service. The marketing website has been designed to be responsive. This means that it performs well across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile devices.
To build the marketing website we used Webflow. Webflow is a web design tool and CMS that offers creative control and flexibility without the need to code. This simplifies the development of the website and reduces the cost of ongoing maintenance.
The Webflow Editor enables client teams to edit content without the need for a complex dashboard or backend UI. Webflow is extremely fast to design with and can deliver scalable sites with SEO optimisations, accessibility and advanced security.
The PressClub web application is a print on demand service that enables schools to create and print newspapers. The app was developed with the Printbox ecommerce platform. Printbox has been developed specifically for the print on demand market.
