We have wanted to do this for a long time. But for for all kinds of reasons, it had never been done. Until last week.

This blog was started back in 2007 (it was not under clingmarks.com domain at that time). From day one, it uses just some very basic wordpress themes. When we had more and more games, we started to think migrating this site to a more professional looking one. But for various reasons, this project had never been on the top of our to-do list.

Last week, finally I decided to do it. My goals are:

• A more professional looking site
• Make it a showcase of our products
• Prettier blog post, with better SEO support
• Fully integrated with Facebook, Twitter and Google+

With our objectives set, we purchased a professional theme for business, and hoped that we just needed to apply it, and everything would be done. But it’s not that simple. The theme is not as flexible as we want, and we also have some specific requests. It actually took me almost a week to work everything out, with the help from the tech support from the theme creator.

On Friday night, we finally figured out all the issues and pushed site to live. The end result is what you are seeing now. I think it’s day and night comparing to our original site. I am very satisfied — just check out this before-and-after here:

Being indie developers is really our passion. That’s what I wrote in the “About Us” page. I am going to quote that page to end this post.

We started by introducing the Penguin Links game on Android Marketplace in March 2009. And it was called “Pair Up”. We did not expect much. The whole practice was really just an Android exercise. However, just a few hours after the initial release, we got the first review! I still remember the excitement we had when we saw that. The first version was very rough, as you can imagine. But users’ feedbacks helped us to get better and better. And a few months later, the “Pair Up” game had become one of the top games in puzzle category, and stayed there for a long time. In last almost three years, this game had more than half million downloads, and thousands of reviews.

At the meantime, we were also working on an iPhone apps, which took longer than we thought. In June 2010, PenguinLinks for iOS was released. However, at that time, the competition at App Store was already very strong, and the games didn’t do as well as we expected. But things changed in the middle of August, 2010. One day when I took out my iPhone to check the number of downloads, I was surprised to see the it has more than doubled from the previous day. But I thought it could be something random. The day after, it doubled again. And tripled again after another day. I knew it must be something big. I checked the downloads by country and found most of them were from China. Then I opened the App Store for China, and saw our game “PenguinLinks Free” was already No. 2 app in the whole app store! Not in one category, not in games, but the whole app store! Our server was so busy (since there was no game center yet at that time, we used our own server to host score board) in those days that it almost crashed. What a fun!

Be frankly, our games were never a big success, such as Angry Bird, Tiny Wings, Jewellust, … But we have enjoyed doing this as much as anybody. The feeling of building something actually used by somebody, loved by somebody, or even criticized by somebody, is just awesome.

We are still working on these projects, on and off — since these are not our fulltime jobs. We may stop working on them someday. But we have had a lot of fun by building this. And hopefully we have brought some fun to our users.

At the meantime, if you want to know more about our products, check out the product page. You can also follow us on Facebook or twitter (please see the footer of this site). Email is always welcome, too. Just drop a line to: support [at] clingmark.com, we’ll get you back.

And finally, thank you ALL for reading this blog, playing our games, leaving feedbacks, … It’s YOU who drives us this far. And we really appreciate that.