My original ideas for 1.5 were pushed out to 1.6 because I am working on the following right now...which will become 1.5:
Customizable Sales, Squeeze, and Landing PagesRight now (1.4) you can certainly make the site into a sales page, squeeze page, or landing page, but you cannot change the site title bar or footer bar when doing so.
To remedy that, I am working on the following changes that, once tested, will become 1.5:
Ability to select any of the following for each individual post or page:- Site Title: Normal, None, or Custom
- Site Footer: Normal, None, or Custom
- Site Background: Normal, None, or Custom
Custom HTML Entities for Sales Pages...
Site Title OptionsNormalIf you leave a post or page set to Normal ( the default ), then the site title configured via the admin panels will be used.
NoneIf you set a post or page to None, then no site title will be drawn. The page will start with the content ( and sidebars if turned on ).
CustomIf you set the site title to Custom, then you can configure a custom set of bars to be displayed for that page or post, with two additional custom bars that will be specific to the page or post.
This means that you can use the pre-existing configured bars ( the page menu bar, the category menu bar, the image bar, the logo bar, the decorative bars, and the custom bars ) and two new custom bars that you can configure in the post.
Configuration for each bar consists of entering content, styling the bar/container, styling links, and styling the hover state of links. This means that you can create completely custom headers by using css ( specify a background and height ) and draw text on them, or you can use html or flash created bars and still apply styling.
Site Footer OptionsThe site footer options work as follows:
NormalUse the normal site footer set up via the admin menus.
NoneTurn the site footer off completely.
CustomWhen selected and saved, this will offer an area to enter content into, an area to style the content container, an area to style links within the content, and an area to style the hover state of links within the content...so you can create a completely customized footer.
Site Background OptionsThis will consist of two style override boxes. One to override the site wide css styling ( the body tag ) and the other to override the background styling of the content area.
Custom HTML Entities for Sales PagesTo start, I am planning on creating the following entities that can be styled via the admin panel:
- A Product Display Box
- A Bonus Item Display Box
- An Opt In Box
- An Act Now Box
- A Testimonial Box
- An Order Box
- A Squeeze Box
Each of these will consist of four items:
- An outer container (div) to hold the other containers
- A heading container (div) designed to hold a heading
- A content container (div) designed to hold content
- A footer Container (div) designed to hold a footer
Additionally, I will most likely add the ability to override styling for each content box on a post by post and page by page basis.
I have the post and page level overrides working and tested and am now working on the sales related containers and trying to decide how to make them easiest to use for people.
With this update I'll also include a custom display intended for use with sales pages and at least three articles:
- Creating a Sales page with the Privateer
- Setting up a Quick Set with your preferred sales page styles ( so you can easily re-use your settings on other servers without any additional configuration )
- Configuring and using the sales related content boxes
Anywise, I've been meaning to do this for my own purposes for quite some time...and decided to go ahead and implement it. The work is fairly close to complete now, so I'm hoping to have 1.5 available sometime Friday.
Can you think of more box types which I am not thinking of?Just let me know and I'll see about getting them in with the rest of the updates.
One last note...All of the above will work hand in hand with quick sets and custom displays. This means that you will be able to:
- Get the look you want for everything then easily export it for use on a new site via quick sets
- Create two column sales pages with arbitrary content on either side of the normal page and post content via use of the side box custom displays
- Add the new custom box types to your archives, search results, home page, and 404 page easily, if wanted.