sales pages

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time now is to be able to create a WordPress page that looks completely different to the rest of the blog.

So the page when clicked on from the home page of the site looks like a regular sales page.

It’s been in my product ideas document for nearly 2 years now, and for one reason or another I’ve not done anything about it.

I decided that enough was enough and I’d started looking for a decent WordPress developer as I thought it might need a plugin developed and/or a special page template created.

I’m sure there are lots of other people out there that have wanted this too. I mean really sure.

My thought was that all we really need was something that threw away all the WordPress stuff on the page itself so that we could just paste in HTML from a sales page design we already had. Maybe a product we have master resale rights to, or some edited PLR sales page, that kind of thing.

I still wanted all the SEO goodness of WordPress for the rest of the site, but the sales page itself had to be standalone. The other proviso was that it didn’t use CSS or any complicated PHP.

It had to be plain and simple good old table based HTML or nothing at all.

Having decided to do it, I started my research. I bought a couple of existing products to see what approach the product developers had taken, and I was gobsmacked at how complicated it all was.

It seems I could only buy a whole THEME with that kind of functionality in it, and in one case it was all or nothing, ie the whole site had to look like the sales page itself, which isn’t what we want at all is it?

And then a thought occurred to me.

As we all should know by now, developers aren’t marketers. They don’t know what it is that we want exactly unless we pin them down and tell them, and even then it doesn’t always go in.

The people who were putting together these methods of displaying WordPress pages with a unique look were going about it from a developers point of view. They were making it more complicated than it actually is.

I thought to myself that there must be an easier way of doing it, so I started looking at the WordPress documentation. Here’s a heads up on that. It’s written by developers for developers. 🙁

So after spending a couple of hours going round in circles yesterday, I suddenly found the exact piece of information that I was looking for.

A quick test and…

You know what? It’s so easy to do I could have just screamed when I realised.

What the flaming heck are these other product owners on exactly? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

And you know what else?

I’m now going to create a low-cost how-to video list-building product out of this as it’s so easy to do and so understandable that anyone with a bit of basic HTML and FTP knowledge can do it.

Perfect.

I’ll make it freely available to anyone that’s signed up to the free tuition so it won’t cost a penny.

For everybody else, let’s say $7. 😉

Watch this space.

-Frank Haywood