Making a Landing page for WordPress

I have been wanting to learn how to make a landing page to use with a wordpress page then I came across this video that explains a great simple way to make one. This will work for any type of page you want to link with your wordpress blog.

This Landing Page Video is useful video below but a little outdated as of this update August 14, 2009 (and again April 2010). Still it will show you some of the ways things work. In fact everything works much the same

Basically he adds the template code and normal html with nothing else to make a template.

I did it a little different on a friends site that is using wp 2.92 and not the Thesis theme. I downloaded the page.php from the theme, added the code to make it a template as in the video, then removed the header, sidebar, and footer code.

So I added

< ?php
/*
Template Name: landingpage
*/
?>

at the top.

Then removed these lines:

< ?php get_header(); ?>

< ?php get_sidebar(); ?>

< ?php get_footer(); ?>

This way the page can be edited like any page right in WordPress but will not have a header, sidebar, or footer.

The result can be seen here:
http://recipes-for-detox-diet.com/test-landing-page/

Of course you could experiment and leave your header and/or footer, or not.

I did this experiment and added this html code in another wordpress page I made while set to html in the edit page section and am getting the title to show in the browser:

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
head>
meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type">
title>title>
meta>head>

(I had to remove the < and "< "/" from the code or it does not show up in the post, don't forget to use those)

 

UPDATE 8/31/2010

I found out if I were to remove the code on the page that looks like this (it may vary a little depending on the theme) :

h2>” title=”< ?php the_title(); ?>”>< ?php the_title(); ?>

In the landingage, which I took out of the theme, page.php, and edited the code is only:

h2>< ?php the_title(); ?>

(the h2 tag is incorrect to show in this post, and I have no idea why WP rendered that code as a link above)) then you will not have the wordpress page title showing. You may want to keep it for seo purposes  but you may have to think it through to have something that will fit for the content on that page.

The final code on the sample page now is:

< ?php
/*
Template Name: landingpage
*/
?>

< ?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

 

< ?php the_title(); ?>

< ?php the_content("

 

__('Read the rest of this page')

"); ?>

< ?php edit_post_link(__('Edit'), '

 

', '

'); ?>

< ?php endwhile; endif; ?

 

 

I think I may have some un-needed DIV's in there but it is working.

 

I could go on to test Meta keywords and Meta Description and one other idea is to start with the wordpress default theme page.php but it is getting late so I will leave that to you to try.

The really easiest, best and fastest way to have many wordpress landing pages is to use the fantastic Thesis Theme. This blog is using the thesis theme. You also get total support from them. One very cool thing you can do easily with the thesis theme is choose to have the landing page title show or not show in your blog theme. I like that and find it very useful. A particular sales page title may not fit in the scheme of my blog and I may just want to only like to it from inside posts or articles where I can do the right amount of pre-selling to improve conversions.

 

In the video below he just takes this code, saves it in a text editor as a .php, then adds  html code below it.

< ?php<br />
/*<br />
Template Name: landingpage<br />
*/<br />
?>

Ultimately you will want to experiment to find  the right option for your theme and goals.

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There is a nicely done Set of WordPress Landing Pages done just for The Thesis Theme you might want to see here . They work by simply writing the name of the page you want into the CSS Class box in any Thesis page editing window. There are several to choose from and with a little study you could probably even create some.

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Trust me, You gotta see This WordPress Plugin that practically writes salesletters for you. Just click the link and take a look, that is all I ask. You have to be impressed by the intelligence here, even if all you do is see this and learn about something this brilliant. 

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Thesis Demo Site — See the Thesis Theme in action!
This Blog is Thesis 1.8, the latest version. It's sweet, check the tech on it.

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