Help choosing a theme

[MMOB]

Hi

I'm looking at the revolution themes and I love them! I am thinking about purchasing the support package but before I do I have a couple of questions about the themes. I hope this doesn't mean I will get my post deleted!

BEST THEME FOR SHOWCASING STATIC PAGES
I love the carousel effect that a number of the themes use. I am wondering whether any of the themes have front page images that link to pages rather than posts as I'd like to use the blog as a showcase for products that I am selling and have each on a static page, rather than on blog posts. Is that feasible? And is it a major customization to change that?

I like the look of Office, Elements and Lifestyle as options and wondered whether these could be easily converted to showcase pages instead of posts???

LOGOS/HEADER GRAPHICS
To help me make a quick start (as this business is new and doesn't have logos etc yet). Are there any themes that DON'T require customized images?? e.g. you can put in the name of your business and it will insert that in a nice font in the header?

I will get header graphics created but I'd like to get the website up and running now and I don't see anywhere that you can type in the name of the website and have it automatically replace the Revolution title in the header. Am I blind or is that not an option with the existing themes?

[Craig Tuller]

The carousel affect that you mention comes from a plugin, but at present it does not support Pages ... only Posts.

The only current theme that does not require a graphic image for the header is the code-blue,red,gray series, which is a standard blog theme.

The things that you talk about can all be done via customization if you have the skill or hire someone that does.

[MMOB]

Thanks Craiger!

[Paul]

To add to what Craig said, depending on the number of products you have you could just use posts instead of pages, but you could remove things like the date and comments from the posts. It might not be manageable if you have hundreds of products, but if it's just a few that you're showcasing then it should be fine. Then you would be able to use the Carousel or FCG if you wanted.

[MMOB]

Hi Paul

There are only a few products. Or in some cases there are "bundles" of products that could come under one category. I was thinking of using pages to display them but I guess posts could work with some modifications.

I'm going to explore the showcase and see what other people have done!
Thanks

[Paul]

You know what.... now you say that you should definitely work with posts and not pages. I'd use the categories to categorize the products and the posts as the product pages. Like I say, it's easy to make the post appear as standard pages if you want to remove things like the date and the comments. You might even want to leave the comments in - if the products are good and people leave positive comments you'll sell a lot more products too :)

Is it affiliate products you mean, or products of your own? The reason I ask is that if it's products of your own then you might be better to use a cart. But perhaps not.

[CarpetGuy]

Using pages and subpages works fine and if you need a simple shopping cart that will work with posts or pages, I have used eShop, it is not too complicated, Check out eShop If you would like to see a site that uses it, this is one I built for a friend, StuckNTheSixties.

[MMOB]

Thanks David and Paul

I might have to shift my thinking to thinking about categories and posts instead of pages! The customer testimonials for comments is a great idea!!!

I have a shopping cart for people once they've made the purchase, but I wanted to have a nice layout to present the products, testimonials, special offers, etc. Maybe wordpress isn't the right choice, but I'm sure there must be a way to get this to look pretty and be functional.

I had a quick look at eshop, and it looks pretty good.

These are my own products/digital downloads but I will offer people affiliate links to sell them too. Possibly I should have separate landing pages for each of them, as the accepted wisdom is that you shouldn't give people other places to go once they get to your site, as they might escape before they purchase!

[Paul]

Here's something else to look at...

http://www.instinct.co.nz/e-commerce/

[MMOB]

I had a look at that because they offer a membership module, but I remember there were some problems with it. I visited the forum and it seemed they were sorting out a few kinks, but it looks very promising. I'll have to go back through my notes to try and remember why the system didn't integrate when i investigated it. Possibly, they have enhanced it now.

Getting good paying membership modules has been a challenge. I had an issue as I wanted to make the posts private on one of my blogs so only members could see them - but keep the pages public. It got quite messy. I was going to use amember, but it needs to work with a physical directory and I was using a virtual directory to split the private blog from the public static pages. I'm starting over with a new blog, and I'm doing all the research in advance as the old one has been a nightmare of technical hassles, that got way beyond my skills. I was spending all my time troubleshooting and not getting any blogging and marketing done!

As a temporary measure I used a plug in that made some posts private (wp sentry) but I discovered that you can't schedule posts in advance if they are private. I wanted to be able to schedule in advance so I could write all my content one day a week/month and have it go up during the week so members would have fresh content at regular intervals. I gave up using the wp plug ins for members as they were based around private posts. I tried the role manager plug ins but for some reason they didn't work either. Sorry to sound vague but I've tried so many things that didn't work they all blur :mrgreen:

This time I'm going to get it right...

[MMOB]

The instinct module is coming back to me. I telephoned them to ask if they could customise one of their modules to suit my purposes and sent a follow up email, but they didn't come back with a quote, so I abandoned the idea of working with them.

[Paul]

In that case, you may well love me for this...

http://member.wpwishlist.com

:D

[Paul]

You know, every time I look at that software it just gets more and more appealing to me.

To make it better still you could install this plugin...

http://simplepressforum.com

It ties in seamlessly with WP's user/member database, so you could have individual forums for each product that only customers of that product would have access to and everything would be handled for you automatically.

There's an awful lot you could do with a combination of those two plugins ;)

[MMOB]

OMG I am seriously in love! It even integrates with 1shoppingcart... I have to have a nose around it, but it sounds brilliant. I've looked at a few paid options for wp plug ins but none of them were perfect. If it's free you don't mind mucking around but when you're paying you want to be able to take it off the shelf and not have to tweak it.

The only one I found that could do everything I needed was memberspeed and that is very expensive (although it does come with extra modules for affiliate management)

Are you involved in the development? And what the heck are you doing up so early in the morning?

[Paul]

No, it's nothing to do with me. I just came across it recently - it's quite new I think. Test out their support and see what happens.... I think they're pretty good and they've got a guarantee, which they would hopefully adhere to if you had any problems.

Should ask them if they could add an inbuilt affiliate program. I'd be surprised if they're not thinking about it.

Yeah it is a bit late here. Time for bed soon...

[MMOB]

It's not one that I've seen in the WP forums. We had a couple of threads going for people looking for membership sites. I might toss that one into the mix and see if anyone has dealt with them

Have a good night's sleep (what's left of it)!

[Paul]

Please post a reply here if you do find out anything more or if you decide to buy it. I'd be interested to hear how you get on.

[MMOB]

Will do

The other plugin I'm going to check out is memberwing

Last I heard they hadn't integrated payment gateways but were working on it, and it's free. Someone told me the developers are from Mensk (means nothing to me, but apparently they have a good rep)

[Paul]

Means nothing to me either, but it looks okay. I think if I was using something like this to effectively manage my whole business I'd prefer that it had either been around for a while, or that I was paying for it so it was in their interests to carry on with the development. WP upgrade all the time and there would be nothing worse than it all stopping working because a developer lost interest or whatever. Of course, it could happen with a paid solution too, but that might give me more piece of mind.