wordpress

Jul

2009

Marketing Genius – Don’t You Just Love It?

I’ve just found out about a new service Pawan Agrawal is doing for all us WordPress blog owners.

As WordPress updates the software (currently 2.8.1 as I write this), then inevitably, some older plugins fail. This can be really annoying, and it’s probably happened to you like it has to me.

What Pawan has announced he will do is take on development of older plugins.

Yee-haa.

This is pure Marketing GENIUS on the level of X-Factor and Pop Idol.

Think about this for a moment.

People will tell him what their favourite plugins are, and that they are no longer being developed. As the licences for many plugins are open source of one kind or another, he can safely and legally take on the development of those older (but popular) plugins, and in doing so they become HIS.

Think a bit more, and you’ll realise that just like the X-Factor (people vote by phone), other people are doing the market research for him, and finding popular plugins he can easily make his own. And he’s building a network of people who have committed to use the plugins they’ve asked to be revived – they’re pre-sold.

Better still, there’s no new development work to be done. Most of the code is already written, and it’s likely that in most cases it’s just a minor fix to revitalise the plugin again.

In doing so, Pawan becomes the owner of the working version of the plugin.

Because most of these failed plugins are likely to be small amendments in order to get them to work again, it’s almost a case of products and advertising for free.

And of course, Pawan gets to pick and choose the ones he wants to do and we ALL reap the benefits.

But especially Pawan. 😉

Now THAT is a true win-win, which is just the kind of thing I love.

You can go “vote” for your failed plugin below.

http://www.maxblogpress.com/blog/219/maxblogpress-revived/

-Frank Haywood

Jun

2009

WordPress Pages As 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

Apr

2009

5ubliminal Is My New Hero

While doing research for a report on autoblogging, and looking for a tool that would allow you to post to WordPress remotely, I (eventually) came across this blog by 5ubliminal.

It’s well worth signing up to as the owner has released some pretty cool plugins and you’ll only get them if you sign up due to his very nice pp:Morpheus plugin which I’ve just purchased.

If he had an affiliate scheme I’d join it. And if it was a WordPress plugin I’d buy it. 😉

And after purchasing the pp:Morpheus plugin I DEFINITELY want to buy his WordPress store plugin when he releases it, it’s just what I’ve been looking for to use on this site, although I guess I’d want a slight tweak to it. From my recent shopping experience there it allows you access to additional content by adding an access token to your subscriber account on a blog.

The tweak I’d want doing to it is to optionally (on a per-post basis) make some content available to all existing subscribers, but make new subscribers pay for it. Tie that in with an affiliate scheme and it would be bloody awesome. I don’t swear often so I think you can tell what I think about that idea.

If you decide not to look at 5ubliminal’s blog or even subscribe, then at least take 2 minutes of your time to read this and have a chuckle. 5ubliminal is my hero just for creating this page alone.

http://www.5ubliminal.com/

-Frank Haywood

5ubliminal message: I would very much also like a WordPress plugin that allows me to gather subscribers and email them from within WordPress. It would need SMTP support so I could use a service that I like called AuthSMTP.com to ensure email deliverability. Actually I think a lot of people would like that. Thank you. 🙂

Feb

2009

A Different WordPress Theme – Mandigo

I’ve been thinking of changing the theme on this blog. Yes we all need a bit of a change now and then don’t we?

One of the themes I’ve been looking at is the Mandigo theme which is a free one. I’ve been playing with it on a couple of IPK mother sites I’ve set up, and it’s really very nice, better than some of the paid for themes I’ve purchased.

I can confirm it works perfectly with WP 2.7.

(Speaking of which I am really beginning to dislike WP 2.7 because of the dopey new admin interface – WHAT were they thinking? I hope good sense will get them to change it back to the interface we know and love. Anyway…)

The Mandigo theme has a LOT of configuration options so you can make it look quite different on each site you build with it. And of course it works with WP widgets.

For instance it runs at 800 pixels wide, and you can change it to 1024 at the tick of a box in the admin panel. It has several different colour schemes built in (including header graphics) and you can amend them all from within the theme options – no fiddling with the standard WP theme editor.

In fact there are a LOT of options you can change, and the author has even added “HTML inserts” which allow you to change and add useful things such as CSS amendments or tracking code without you having to amend the theme files themselves. The benefit of that is when you upgrade to the latest version, you won’t break any of the changes you’ve made to your site. Very cool.

The default layout shows two columns, the main area and a right hand sidebar. But you can enable a second sidebar, plus top and bottom “sidebars” too which are useful for dropping sign up code or ads into. You can place the left and right sidebars in any configuration you like – sb1-main-sb2, sb2-main-sb1, main-sb1-sb2, etc and you can change the widths of them individually too.

Any pages you add automatically appear in the top menu, and if you create sub-pages in the WP admin area, they appear as sub-pages in a drop-down menu.

You can easily change the appearance of the date in posts, or even remove it altogether.

There are a LOT of settings you can tweak, and I found it possible to make all the changes I needed to make it ideal for use with IPK mother sites. It even has SEO options to re-write title tags, although I use the All-in-One SEO Pack for that purpose.

In Mandigo, it is very easy to change the header graphic. All you have to do is create one and FTP it into the headers directory within the theme at:-

/public_html/wp-content/themes/mandigo/images/headers/

then change a setting within the theme options and your custom header will be displayed. If you drop several graphics in there, they will be displayed randomly. You can even have a different header show per page if you want to by twiddling with a few files.

It really is an excellent piece of work, and I suggest it’s worth taking a little time out to check it out. I’m sure you’ll be as impressed as I am.

-Frank Haywood