If you have your own product to sell, or just want to promote an affiliate product via PPC, you’ll probably want to create some sort of Sales Page LP for it. At a minimum, a standard sales page will have a one-column layout, a compelling headline, and a list of benefits that will pre-sell the visitor to buying whatever product you are promoting. If you are a competent web designer, creating a static sales page like this isn’t too difficult. But what if you are using a CMS like WordPress?
By default, creating a Sales Page with one of the default wordpress themes can be quite challenging. There’s just a lot of stuff to rework and takeout so you can achieve the clean look of a standard sales page. There’s a lot of different ways to achieve this, but in this post, I want to show you how to easily create a sales page using the Thesis wordpress theme, my current WP theme of choice. I originally learned how to do this from Marko Saric’s excellent tutorial, so I wanted to reprint the steps here.
1) Add a new page to your site and write your sales page copy.
2) In the page options, under the SEO Details and Additional Style section, there’s a field called CSS Class. In the text field, I’m entering the name salespage.
3) The next step is to remove all the unnecessary parts of your theme, including the header, sidebars, navigation menu, etc. To do this, you need to open up your custom.css file and copy and paste the following changes:
.salespage #footer { padding-bottom: 0; border-top: 0em; }
.salespage #footer { display: none; }
.salespage #sidebars { display: none; border: none; }
.salespage #tabs {display:none;}
.salespage #content_box { background:none; }
.salespage .comments_closed { display: none; }
.salespage #header #logo { display: none; }
.salespage #header #tagline { display: none; }
.salespage #content { margin: 0 auto; float: none; }
Voila! Your very own “Sales Page Theme”. Now, any page that you tag with this new custom class will turn into a stripped down Thesis page. To make any additional modifications to your sales page, just prepend the .salespage class to any sales page specific css rules in the same custom.css file.
The rest of your pages and posts will be left untouched, so you can have a single sales page and have a standard looking blog as well. Very cool, and I think this demonstrates how powerful and flexible the Thesis theme is. I hope you try this tip out, the next time you need to create a sales page with WordPress.
