WordPress Sales Page Template Done Easy

The other day I was working on a new squeeze page for a mailing list that I’m setting up and I stumbled across something great that I thought I’d share with you. I don’t know if this technique is new, but it is new to me and it could help with some technical headaches that you may have been giving yourself.

First of all, this is for those of you who use WordPress for you sites, but want an easy way to dedicate a single page to a single product and not have it listed on your blog, unless that’s the way you want it.

First of all, you need to have WordPress set up on your website. If you need help with this, visit how to start a business website and learn how. If you are real uncomfortable working with webhosting then I highly recommend page.ly for your WordPress hosting needs. To use this method, you will have to pay the one time $5 fee for FTP access. You will save this in time and headaches by hosting with them.

Once you have your site all set up you are now ready to create a sales or squeeze page for your product or email list. In this case, we are going to pretend that I am working on a sales page for a product which I have acquired the resale rights for. I’m not going to dig into any HTML coding as your favorite WYSIWYG software should take care of this for you.

So, the first thing I’m going to do is open the sales page that comes with my product in my favorite WYSIWYG HTML editor. I recommend Kompozer because it’s free and it is the one I have found easiest to use. At this point, I’m not going to talk about this, but make sure you change the blank information on the sales page and the payment button, you don’t want your customers getting confused and you definitely don’t want them to be paying someone else or not getting to a payment page at all.

While you are editing your HTML you will also want to gather all of the images used on the sales page into one place. The are probably placed in some sort of “images” folder within the product download. I would just copy this folder, paste it, and then rename it as something else. I recommend a format like “templatename-src” so you will be able to find it if you need to troubleshoot.

We talked about editing your text earlier, but you also need to edit the source code for your pictures. Since this template and source code goes into the images folder, your image src should look something like the following:

http://websitename.com/wp-content/themes/themename/templatename-src/imagename.jpg

Be sure you change the CSS code as well or your salespage won’t look right. If your salespage also references an external stylesheet, you will also need to change the source code to this. Put the style sheet in the “templatename-src” folder as well to keep things organized.

Once you have your salespage editing done, do a “save as” and change the file name to something other than “index”, this is important because leaving the file named “index” could interfere with your theme. At this point in time you can close Kompozer or whatever software you are using.

Now, go ahead and open Notepad or your favorite PHP editing software and open the new html file which you just created. You are going to add the following code to the top of your page:

<?php /* Template Name: New Template Name
*/ ?>

Then “save as” “new file name.php”.

Now you need to upload everything via FTP to your website. I prefer to use CoreFTP for uploading to my websites. It’s what I’m used to as I’ve been using it for over 10 years now. You will be uploading your new “templatename-src” folder along with your “new file name.php” file into the wp-content/themename folder. Themename is the name of the current theme you are using.

Wow, this seems so simple when I’m doing this, but it does have more steps than I thought. If I lost you somewhere, please feel free to post in the comments and I will respond there with the answer. We are almost done, so please hang in there.

You will now login to your WordPress site and create a new page like you would normally do. Create a name for your page and then along the left hand side, you will see a header called “attributes” and then the second option should be called “template” which will be followed by a drop-down menu. If everything went right, you should see “New Template Name” as one of your options. Choose this option from the drop-down menu.

Then complete the rest of the fields like you would for any other new WordPress page. Once you’ve done this, preview and you should see your new sales page in all it’s glory. If you don’t, then go back and make sure your files are in the correct folders.

One downfall of this method is you don’t get the SEO benefits of the theme you are using or any SEO plugins you have enabled. You will need to change the title in the HTML code of your page if you are changing it at all. Please keep in mind that I am not a coding expert, so if you are and you see any reasons why salespages should not be set up this way, please feel free to comment.

Also, as I said earlier, please feel free to ask questions you may have in the comments and I will help the best way I can. I will also try to get this up on a video sometime soon as I think it is a lot easier to follow if you see it.

Until later,

Thank you for taking the time to visit and read my blog. If you choose to make a purchase through any of the links on this page I may be compensated by your purchase. I really appreciate your support and hope to see you back soon.

Originally posted 2010-06-07 07:13:44. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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