Month: June 2013

Jun

2013

Page Templates PTP101-PTP110

Update: The sale at $17.00 for the Page Template plugin plus 10 BRAND NEW page templates is now live. Included in this sale only is a client flipper licence.

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Today at 6.00pm GMT I’m releasing 10 brand new never-before-released page templates for the Page Template Plugin.

These are all very clean and attractive designs and come with the latest version of the Page Template Plugin (v1.0.5) which has had a minor bugfix.

(Start the video and then switch to 720p and full screen.)

If you’ve never heard of or seen the Page Template Plugin, then in a nutshell it’s a very elegant solution to adding pre-designed sales and squeeze pages to your WordPress driven sites.

Because it’s a plugin, then in 99% of cases it will work with your favourite theme and digital delivery solution.

This means you can build sites using a theme you like, plus a digital delivery or membership solution that you’re happy with, and set up independent sale and squeeze pages that don’t look like the theme.

In my view this is a better solution than using an all-in-one theme to create sales pages on your site.

Using the Plugin after Installation

Because these pages are all pre-designed for you, then you don’t even need any design skills. 😉

I’ve uploaded the templates and created some demo pages for you to see each of the templates here:-

http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp101/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp102/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp103/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp104/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp105/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp106/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp107/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp108/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp109/
http://60secondsalespages.com/ptp110/

Given that it can cost you an average price of around 47-67 dollars for a custom design that won’t even work with WordPress, I’m sure you can see this is a fantastic bargain and not one to be missed. After the sale is over, each of these designs will be available for $5 apiece so if you want the best price, now is the time to get them.

Just $17. 🙂

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2013

Mobile / Responsive – Some Thoughts

I’ve just answered an email asking about responsive themes, and I thought it would be a good idea to post my answer here too. I was asked if any of my themes were responsive, and this is my reply.

No they aren’t I’m afraid. It’s a difficult thing to do and it’s often an unsatisfying result I find.

If you look at how YouTube have approached it recently, it’s ticked off a lot of people including my eldest son and his friends, who have had custom page templates designed in the past that were meant for a desktop based web browser rather than mobile.

What I’d like to see is a dual hit method where a theme presented the regular desktop appearance when viewed with a desktop browser, and something much simpler when viewed with a mobile device. And there’s another problem, because what resolution do you define as mobile? Cell phones – yes. Tablets – hmm, maybe, oh okay yes then. But what size tablet would you serve the mobile view? My Kindle Fire HD is a 7 inch device but has a resolution of 1280×800.

Viewing “normal” web browser page is a little difficult because it’s only a 7 inch display, and a mobile view of sites would suit it better. In contrast the monitor sitting next to me is a 19 inch device with a resolution only a little better than my Kindle at 1360×768, but viewing a mobile page on it would just be silly. 😉

And… Cell phones will soon have (if they haven’t already) very high resolution displays but still tiny screens to show content. What view do you serve them? Or do you just serve the same content to all devices and let the device sort it out?

That doesn’t work because of the resolution issue I discussed above.

*sigh*

I guess that eventually someone (it might be me) will come up with a clever (and simple!) solution, but it seems for now that we’re either stuck with normal desktop browser views, or responsive where everything moves around to occupy a different layout depending on the resolution of the device. Neither is a very good answer.

It seems the only way to do it to make everyone happy is to have a number of different page views depending on device rather than on screen resolution. You can sort of guess this by browser and OS, but sometimes it’s going to be wrong.

If you go to Starbucks.com on your desktop browser and then gradually narrow the browser you’ll see how the site adjusts, stacking images underneath each other. That’s okay, but their site has had to be designed VERY simplistically and blockish for this to work.

Hands in air, right now I don’t know how to approach this but I guess at some point with some thought I’ll come up with something.

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2013

Magic Optin Plugin

Update: The sale at $17.00 for the easy to use Magic Optin plugin is LIVE. The price will rise to ~~$27~~ when the sale is over.

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Magic Optin Overview Video

In response to some questions about it, here’s a short 2-minute video on how to add the form code manually if it doesn’t get parsed correctly the first time round.

Many people will tell you that the size of your business is directly related to the size of your mailing list. While I know for a fact that’s not strictly true, more subscribers is always going to be better than less.

The Magic Optin plugin assists you in designing and placing optin boxes on your blogs, and gives you some pre-set designs you can mix and match and almost unlimited options for the colour schemes.

This means you can spend just a little time and come up with an optin design to suit your blog theme that will blend in really nicely and look like it was created by a professional designer and not you. 😉

Better still is that it’s VERY easy to use and includes a *custom widget* for your sidebar, AND a *short code* if you want to insert your new optin form into a post or page.

Here’s an idea.

Create your optin form, and then every time you add a new page or post to your blog, then add the optin short code so that your form appears within your content.

That way there’s a reminder on every single page and post for visitors to subscribe to your mailing list in order to find out when new posts are made and about any special offers (like a weekend sale) you may be running.

Here’s a few screen shots of the output of the plugin as an example.

The first shot is of an example of the optin form in the sidebar. The shots following that were generated using the short code tag and inserted into a post. All styles were changed just by using colour pickers and drop-down selectors.

The sale price for this cool new plugin starts at $10 for the first 50 copies and then starts to rise. When the sale is over the full price of this plugin will be ~~$27~~.

In this launch sale ONLY, also included are full developer (client/flipper) licences at no extra charge because I know that’s the way you like it. After the sale these will be an optional purchase.

These are good incentives to get the plugin today. 🙂

-Frank Haywood