WordPress Themes

Dec

2014

Profit Builder Plugin and Theme Review

Continuing my recently started quest, what I’ve been looking for is a plugin or theme that will enable me to build modern looking sales pages and also while having a clean looking blog too.

Well, I received a couple of emails about a plugin and theme combo that I missed when it came out.

Profit Builder Plugin and Theme

What’s nice is that the creator (Sean) is doing a special at the moment and is only charging 67 CENTS more (!!!) for the developer licence which allows you to install it on UNLIMITED personal & client sites.

That’s what I call a good deal. 😉

What I particularly like about this theme and plugin set is that it comes with more than 60 pre-made layouts that you can select from to instantly build a page. This includes the “traditional” marketing pages you might need such as squeeze, sales and JV, but also has a pile of other layouts too.

All you then need to do is edit the colours and the content.

It also ticks the box for my requirement of a clean looking blog.

With a bit of a proviso…

At the moment the provided theme component forces you into publishing excerpts on the front page rather than the full content, so I’ve just written to the creator about that to get it changed to be an option.

I understand why he’s done it that way – it’s purely because of SEO – but at the moment I like to put the full content of my posts on the blog page.

I might change my mind about that, we’ll see, and at any rate, if I really want to I can just use the plugin component with another theme.

That’s because one of the on-page options is to use a full width blank page template, and that means you can use any theme and still get the benefit of the snazzy looking pages this can build.

Now that’s what I call joined-up thinking. 😉

It would be nice if that small part of the theme worked the way I wanted it to, but maybe I’m nit-picking over what is actually a very powerful plugin and theme combo.

That aside, I like this plugin so much I think I’m going to use it to launch a new product range and site. More on that when I’m ready.

It has a ton of really nice features and almost everything can be amended in either the plugin, theme or on-page settings.

There’s also some included extras like an exit redirect so you don’t need to install a separate plugin to do that.

The creator has really tried to think of everything and it’s clear he uses this himself.

Here are just some of the features – I had to create a video to show off some of the other stuff so you’d understand how it all ties together.

o Over 60+ pre-designed lead, sales and marketing layouts
– Opt-In Pages
– Social Gates
– About Me Pages
– Sales Pages
– Coming Soon Pages
– Local Marketing Pages
– Member Portals
– Review Pages
– JV Pages
– Webinar Pages
– Bonus Pages
– ECommerce Sites
– Launch Pages
– Upsell Pages
– Training Series

o Easy to use drag and drop marketing page builder
o The plugin component will work with any theme
o Included theme for search optimised usage
o Create and save your own layouts/templates
o Save all your theme settings to use on another site
o Full featured typography section for INDIVIDUAL elements
o Optional included exit redirect on pages
o Includes the Revolution slider plugin bundled with the theme
o A ton of other cool stuff…

Okay?

I stumbled with some of the functionality as a) there’s so much of it, and b) it isn’t all totally clear until you get a feel for how it all works and ties together. Hence the video above – I hope this helps you to get started quickly with the plugin.

You can get to the sales page here. There’s a 67 CENT developer special currently running, but I honestly don’t know how much longer this will stay in place, so don’t dilly-dally over this one.

Profit Builder Plugin and Theme

This is definitely one to pick up, and I suspect you might start using it for many of your sites.

-Frank Haywood

Oct

2014

Plugin Great Membership

The first year of the Plugin Great membership is about to come to an end in a few days, and I think it’s all gone rather well.

My wife suggested I run a special to mark this first year, so starting today at 6.00pm GMT and for a further 48 hours I’m offering the same stunning launch deal as I did last year.

If you’re a new subscriber, then the deal is you pay either an annual or a monthly fee and you then get all my plugins and themes as I release them included.

That means that from today at 6.00pm GMT and then for 48 hours you can join up for just $17 / month (normally ~~$27~~) saving yourself $10/month.

But better than that is the annual option at $97 / year (normally ~~$147~~).

That’s less than half the price of monthly and saves you $107 over the year.

In other words it works out to just a smidgeon over $8 per MONTH for access to a big back catalogue of plugins PLUS all other plugins and themes I release for 12 months from when you join.

If you buy the annual membership deal.

Pretty cool I think.

I don’t mind which one you go for – it’s entirely up to you – but these membership options are a one-off. This is because in 48 hours I’m putting the annual price back up to ~~$147~~, and the monthly to ~~$27~~.

If you’re one of the many people who buy almost everything I release, then the annual option is the best one for you, but if you prefer to pay monthly and see “how it goes” that’s okay too.

Either one beats the $10 per PRODUCT option. 😉

When the 48 hours is up I’ll raise the prices and close the deal.

You can find out all the details here on the sales page, please remember this starts at 6.00pm GMT…

http://plugingreat.com/join-the-plugin-great-membership/

And if you have any questions about this, then please ask them here.

-Frank Haywood

May

2013

Instant WP

There’s a new bit of *paid* software been released that allows you to easily set up a localhost WordPress installation.

You’ll likely get an email or two or three from people promoting it over the next few days.

I didn’t buy it because it’s already been done. For free. A few years ago.

(Probably more than once.)

Why would you want to install WP locally and not on a web site?

Simply because you get to test everything at lightning fast speeds BEFORE you deploy it on your web site. That way you can make sure everything works the way you expect it to before anyone else sees it live.

PHP is amazingly quick when run on an up to date PC. I can confidently say you’ve never seen WP run so fast until you run it on your PC – the page change on a menu click is near instant.

However…

The fact of the matter is setting up WP to run locally can be a nightmare, but some clever guy (Seamus Brady) in 2009 came up with the software to do it (for Windows only I’m afraid) and has been updating it every so often when it needs it.

It will even run on a USB stick for total portability (which I like). Just copy it to wherever you want to run it from.

Once you’ve downloaded and run the executable unzipper, you just fire it up to get a really nice dashboard presented to you where you can see your local site, log into the admin panel, use MySQL admin, and view the documentation.

Trust me, it’s a doddle to use.

All the nasty stuff like setting up the Apache web server, PHP and MySQL are done totally transparently in the background for you and it just works, which is how we like things isn’t it?

http://www.instantwp.com/

There’s documentation on the site, but if you’d like me to do a few videos explaining it all and how to run it on a USB stick etc, then just let me know by leaving a comment.

My guess is there are similar freebies out there that I don’t know about, but if *you* do then please let me know and I’ll pass it on to everybody. 🙂

Now then, before I sign off, I know that some people will want to consider the paid-for option because there’s a whole lot MORE in the paid-for version rather than just the software – there are a number of bonuses too. No I’m not going to go through them all but it’s a quite a comprehensive list of information, themes, plugins, and how-to’s. (Take a look at the sales page on the link below.)

And one big technical difference between the free and the paid software is that the paid for version comes with 10 WP development installations you can switch between and the free version only comes with one.

So, free or paid? You decide.

http://www.frankhaywood.com/wordpress-sim-machine/

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2013

PLR WordPress Plugins

Of all the emails I get from people, questions about my WordPress PLR membership re-opening top the lot.

Well, it’s about to re-open on Sunday 28th April. Hurrah!

I know that there will be plenty of people reading this that will punch the air and shout “Yes!”

My PLR membership has been responsible for a whole swathe of plugins being released. In fact I’ve released over 24 plugins with PLR, and I believe I was the first to be able to offer this kind of service as a membership.

Every so often I see them turning up in resale rights bundles, or being given away in return for people signing up to a mailing list, given away as bonuses, or tucked away in member areas.

People love these plugins. Even some of my own plugins I sell have made it into the PLR membership too.

And some members have even told me they only buy the plugins for their own use.

So what happened?

The membership had to go into a temporary closed state due to problems with PayPal (now resolved) and I hoped I’d have it re-opened by now, but other things have been going on and I didn’t have the time to do it as it does take quite a while to get everything ready.

But at last it’s time to kick it all off again.

And this time round I’ve decided to change the format a little with the re-opening.

For 2 years I supplied a plugin each month (sometimes late, ahem) with documentation and a sales page, and instructions on how to rebrand everything.

What I didn’t do was write any sales copy, and I did this for the very good reason that if you write your own sales pages, then you’re not competing with everyone else all selling the same thing.

All the smart marketers do this, me included.

YES! I love and buy PLR from time to time, spend a few hours working on it and release it all bright and shiny (and UNIQUE) as my own. If anyone has ever spotted that occasionally I’ve released a PLR product, then no-one in nearly 4 years of me doing this has ever said a word to me about it.

I put that down to the work I put into making enough change for it to be unique – there’s that word again. (And often I make the product better by adding value to it that wasn’t there.)

The trick is to move quickly and not overthink things.

Yes we all do that, me included, but I *try* to keep things as simple as I can.

With the old membership I didn’t write any sales copy and that was the one thing that I got criticised about most.

And so I resisted and insisted to everyone that brought it up that it was most important they do their own thing with the sales copy. But in the end I’ve realised that you have to give people what they want and it was dumb of me not to come to that conclusion in the first place.

I thought (and still think) I was doing the right thing, but okay…

Yes I WILL be supplying a sales page with the plugins in the new membership.

I figure that those people who want to write their own sales copy or heavily modify what I supply will do so, and those that don’t will just use what I give them, and that way everybody’s happy.

I’ll also be giving every plugin its own name and creating the documentation using that name. Again if you want to rename it and modify the docs you can do so, and everybody’s still happy.

So here’s the new membership deal.

Tomorrow and for 24 hours ONLY you can join for just $20/month. This will make a lot of people happy.

When that 24 hours is up, the price goes up by another $7 for another 48 hours and then AFTER THAT I’ll be changing the pricing structure of the membership for all new members. (Yes it will cost new members more money.)

Look, just don’t worry about it okay? Do not sweat it.

Join tomorrow when the membership re-opens and it’s all nice and simple (and cheap) for you. You’ll be a special founder member and won’t have to do what everyone else does afterwards. 😉

You can cancel your membership any time, but there won’t be any refunds because this is PLR.

Okay?

So what’s the first plugin at relaunch?

It’s the brand new and very cool “Time Sensitive Widgets” plugin.

This plugin puts a set of time in and out drop-downs on EVERY single widget and allows you to set a date and time for a widget to go active and inactive.

In other words you can set a date and time for ANY widget to show on your blog, and also set a date and time for it to disappear.

The possibilities of this plugin are MASSIVE. 🙂

Here are some examples plus that GREAT IDEA I mentioned at the beginning of this email.

You could use the Time Sensitive Widgets plugin to sell ad space, give away coupon codes, run daily video tutorials, do launch announcements and make EVENT NOTIFICATIONS. I know there are some people reading this that would be very interested in the posibilities of that last one.

In essence you could use the plugin to make your blog that extra little bit “stickier” and keep people coming back every day to see what’s happening.

>> For example, the video tutorials idea is a really sweet one. <<

It’s very cheap now to create quality desktop recordings. Where you once had to spend hundreds on expensive software, you can now pay something like $15/year to use a really cool tool to record and edit your desktop and webcam.

(Why don’t I do a video tutorial on that!?)

This is what you could do, and what I’m going to do too.

Create a series of short (less than 10 minutes each) desktop video recordings that show how to do something useful.

Show a new one in the series each day, and then remove it and replace it with the next one. You can set all these up in advance using the “Time Sensitive Widgets” plugin.

Your readers have to turn up every day in order to see the next one.

If they miss one that’s really too bad, but you could make an offer to them of joining your membership where they get new videos every month and get to see all of the other videos you’ve ever released, all tucked away for members eyes only.

You start with a low price each month and as the library grows in size and value you increase your price.

Is that a GOOD idea or what?

ANYONE could do this, why not you? 😉

It all starts with joining my PLR membership when it reopens on Sunday.

-Frank Haywood

Apr

2013

New Theme XD07

Update: The sale at $17.00 for the scorchingly nice XD07 Theme and 3 Plugin Bundle is now LIVE.

You also get the very useful Scripts Manager and Snippet Inserter plugins as part of this deal.

***

Here’s a link to a demo of the XD07 theme.

As you’d expect it’s really nice and has a number of great features to build a WordPress driven site around, such as:-

6 built in colour schemes plus a custom colour changer.
A built in “Alert Box” popup optionally home page only or whole site.
Image and video slideshow with selectable slideshow transition effects.
7 “Home Boxes” split into two sections, up to 4 boxes, and up to 3.
Optional social sharing icons for articles and post and pages.
Social networking Buttons at top and bottom (Facebook, Twitter, etc).
A “quote” area at the bottom, with WYSIWYG editor.
4 editable footer widgets area.
A rich HTML WYSIWYG editor in many admin sections.
A custom CSS section so you don’t have to hack the stylesheets.
Featured posts category to display posts on the home page.
The ability to optionally turn on and off almost everything.

Plus some other bits and pieces such as add your logo or name text, phone number, and copyright notices, and the ability to disable the main nav bar if that’s something you’d like to do.

In other words lots and LOTS of options to play around with.

In this launch sale it comes with a full developer licence (client/flipper) and I’m also including TWO BONUS plugins, Script Manager and Snippet Inserter.

The Script Manager plugin is exceptionally useful for adding things like tracking and popup scripts (javascript, PHP) to your site and I install it as a matter of course on all my blogs now.

You can either add your scripts globally (e.g. for tracking) or on a page by page or post basis – e.g. for popups and similar.

You can tell the plugin to insert the code in the <head> or <footer> areas of your site which is where most scripts are placed. Without the plugin you’d have to hack the theme to insert tracking code etc and you wouldn’t have any control over which page or post it would be active on.

Script Manager is a bit of a “must-have” workhorse of a plugin that just does the job efficiently.

Snippet Inserter is a simple but very useful plugin that allows you to add PHP, javascript and HTML snippets to your posts and pages and supplies you with a [short-code-tag] to place where you want the code inserted.

For example you may want to add video embed code from YouTube to a particular page or post, or maybe some PHP, or a form. Normally WordPress doesn’t let you do this in the TinyMCE editor, but you can get round this problem with Snippet Inserter.

Both plugins come with full developer (client/flipper) licences in this deal.

The theme and two plugin bundle is just $17 for two days after the sale opens on Wednesday 17th at 2.00pm GMT/BST (9.00am EST/EDT), and will rise to ~~$27~~ on Saturday morning, and then ~~$37~~ at sale end on Monday.

My advice for what it’s worth is to get it as soon as the sale opens. 🙂

-Frank Haywood