Once upon a time, many moons ago, I had a bright idea. As with many of my bright ideas, I didn’t have the time at that moment to execute said bright idea, so it bounced around in the back of my head for awhile.

What was my bright idea? To figure out a way to create “traditional-looking” sales pages in my WordPress site. I thought it would be a piece of cake, but alas…I was wrong. Really wrong.

Now, you all know how I love WordPress. But those dang sidebars and headers and footers and other “distractions” were giving me fits. In some themes, I was easily able to remove the sidebars, other themes, not so much. In none of them was I able to get rid of the header and the footer without seriously messing things up.

All throughout this time, I was constantly Googling for solutions. I found themes that were built specifically to create sales and landing pages, but some were too bloggy looking for me, and others were…well…sorry, but they were just butt-ugly.

Besides, I like the theme I’m using and want to keep it. I didn’t want to have to change themes because then what would become of the rest of my content on my site? I didn’t want EVERY page to have a sales page format – just a couple here and there.

Then, I found FlexSqueeze, a theme with 5 built-in squeeze page templates. It’s a great theme, and I really like it. But I don’t want to build every theme I build for the rest of my life in FlexSqueeze, no matter how flexible and customizable it is.

Then, just before WordPress Summer Camp started, I found another solution…more of a hack, really. It worked, but the pages weren’t editable within the WordPress page editor, so that was only a partial solution.

Fast forward to last week. I woke up two mornings in a row vaguely aware that I’d been dreaming about sales pages in WordPress. I laughed because that used to happen to me all the time when I was a programmer in that other life I had. (I swear I wrote as many programs in my sleep as I did awake!)

Friday morning, I decided enough was enough. I was going to figure out the solution to my problem – period. Another hour of Google and a couple hours poking around in the WordPress Codex and I had it!

WP Sales Page was born! It’s not a theme and it’s not a plugin. It’s a page template with its very own CSS style sheet (which is how it can look so different than the theme that is installed at the site.) It works with any theme and is completely self-contained. You just upload two files and one folder to your active theme directory and you’re in business!

I tried it out on a few of my own pages and because it worked so well, I decided to make it my very first product so others could benefit, too. Saturday was spent creating the bonus graphics and code examples included in the package, and Sunday I built the website for it and wrote the documentation. Monday morning, I had my first sales.

WP Sales Page might be just the ticket for you, too. Check it out!

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