I’ve got 2 new free WP themes ready for release. The first is going to be a new WP Commerce theme for use with EPN and Amazon affiliate sites. The second is a magazine style theme with some cool features.
The problem – I’ve been using the Theme Switcher plugin to display my theme previews, and it works great in some cases, but themes that have an unconventional sidebar setup don’t display well. A good example is my WP Commerce Steel theme preview. I need to find a way to display all my themes so that they look finished, and don’t have any weird looking sidebar problems.
I was going to try to tackle this with WP MU, but I can’t get the install to work, partially I think because I have a regular WP install in the root directory.
If anyone has any good suggestions for a good way to do this, I would really appreciate it, and I will quickly release my two new themes.
In other news, I’m also still looking for more feedback in regards to the EPN tutorial series. So far I am still planning on doing a tutorial covering how to set up the Flexi Pages widget, and how to set up the most recent Search-2-Post release. If anyone has other ideas for tutorials, let me know. I’m working on the marketing and promotion portion of the tutorial and I’m thinking of going through it by combining it with a live case study, to pinpoint particularly effective marketing techniques. Stay tuned.
Tags: News, theme previews, WP Commerce, wp mu
Hi Sam,
As always, looking forward to the tutorials you have planned. The marketing/promotion one sounds great…always looking for new ideas there.
So far, I’ve been letting my new EPN sites just “simmer” a bit…no promotion yet at all as I want to customize them more and add some unique content before promoting them as “finished” to G. But I’m happy to report I’m already getting a trickle of traffic and have made a couple sales…even an “international sale” using Alan’s geotargeting files.
That’s something I always wanted to do with BANS but never got around to installing the other country store files. But with the phpbay setup, it’s much easier/faster to “go international”. So, I’m very excited about the potential there! Alan says nothing extra needed to market our sites internationally–just let Google do it’s thing. If you’re doing anything extra to market internationally, I’m sure we’d all be interested in that, too. I once submitted a v1.3 BANS site to Baidu.com and Rambler.ru just to test the waters and it did get added eventually, but no spectacular results since it was still just a US store. Maybe it’s worth doing now on these new sites with the geotargeting/country-specific stores feature.
As far as ideas for other tutorials, if you know of a way to embed videos from a feed such as YouTube vides, that would be something I believe many would like to know. I’ve searched around and see a lot of people have the same problem…it’s easy enough to add a video feed of, say, product reviews, but typically the videos are not embedded in your site and so when the visitor clicks on it, off they go to YouTube or wherever and it’s “buh bye hard-won visitor”!
Will let you know if I think of anything else.
Sam,
Great series and I am looking forward to the new themes, since I am preparing to launch several stores I would like to settle on one theme, get to know it well, and be productive. I have been switching themes between stores and there is a lot of wasted time relearning from theme to theme. Regarding future topics, I would like to see more on building backlinks, since that is where it seems to be these days with Google and getting decent ranking.
Regarding a previous post on inserting video in a WordPress post, here is absolutely the slickest approach I have found. Very easy and it keeps visitors on your site: http://www.ejump.co.uk/wordpress/easytube-plugin-for-wordpress/
I have it working on this site if anyone wants to check it out Die Cut Machines