It’s not about Landing Pages

But creating them doesn’t seem to be the problem. The problem has been, and will always be, conversions. And in the conversion game, one option is better than most – the campaign or personalized url (PURL for short).

A PURL is a personalized url that often ends in a name, like http://amazon.com/johnsmith/ and you can imagine how compelling it is to get that url sent to you (in a post card or email campaign). Once the person (in this case John Smith) clicks on it, they are taken to a landing page that has dedicated and customized content just for them. The result? Better conversion. Every time.

So if we all know it to be true, why is that the existing PURL products for WordPress all suck? Some are complicated to use, and some are just too expensive. Some even require that you pay monthly.

Elegant PURL

So today I’m announcing that a friend and I are trying to create an elegant approach to PURLs. And that’s why we’re calling it ElegantPURL. It’s a solution just for WordPress and our goal will be to keep it simple, while keeping the development quick and cheap – so that it doesn’t have to be an expensive solution for others.

The beta group (part of the Advanced WordPress facebook group) will be testing it over the next several days and then we’ll do a formal launch. But I’m positive people will like it.

Here’s a quick preview:

At Emphasys Software, after a lot of discussion and debate, we decided to move into the residential Real Estate sector. It’s not that we weren’t already in real estate – after all, we’ve been building software for Public Housing Authorities and Housing Finance Agencies for decades. But that’s the public sector and government organizations. This would be different. And the one thing we agreed, early on, was that whatever we did, we wouldn’t do web sites for residential real estate. Because it didn’t make money. There were millions of competitors. And most importantly, competition was hyper-local, and we weren’t going to invest in a national strategy to fight a local fight.

The Decision

But after a year in the space, my boss came to me and said he wanted us to build a real estate offering. It would start with brokerage solutions. But soon it moves to web sites. It was my first chance to introduce WordPress into our organization, and I was happy to talk about a potential solution, since it would mean we wouldn’t have to build our own content management system (CMS). WordPress could do it all for us. After all, real estate agents and brokers were already looking at using WordPress for this kind of thing.

I remember the call, talking to my boss about WordPress. I explained the benefits of themes and plugins and suggested we could write our own plugin and theme so that we could make maintenance really easy. He said he’d review the plugins over the weekend. HA! He didn’t realize how large that repository would be.

Shortly after we started, we decided that we’d use MultiSite – which was just coming onto the scene – as well as a single theme to bring the solution together. This is the story of how we did it.

The Solution

There are solutions in Real Estate for web sites that let you drop an iframe in the site. That’s just crap. You can’t get any of that content indexed for your site, so what’s the point? So right off the bat, we knew we wouldn’t go that route. There are other solutions in Real Estate, specifically for WordPress, that let you pull MLS listings onto your site (so that they can be indexed) even if they’re not in your database. The way it works is that the url that’s called gets intercepted and a call goes out in the background and pulls the data to the site to display on the page. This gives you the benefit of having the content on the site, but presents it’s own challenges. First, unless you put links on your pages, there’s no way a spider will pick up and index that content. Second, performance is driven by some other site, not your own hosting infrastructure. Lastly, you are left with the listings that the provider offers you – in terms of slicing and dicing data. If you only manage listings in a marina, but the MLS provider doesn’t segment the data that way, you’re hosed.

MLS Listings moved from the Cloud to the WordPress Database

So the first part of our solution is an approach that moves the listing records from a central server (pulled from MLS integrations and stored in it’s own database in the cloud) to a site’s specific WordPress database. This makes sure that you can determine any segmentation of data you want to import, which is good. It also puts listings on the specific site, so indexing happens easily. And lastly, performance is based on your hosting configuration. So if you’re using WPEngine, for example, and the whole database is in RAM, you’ll have a lightning fast site.

MultiSite – One Site that Rules them All

As we started thinking about our approach, the biggest deal for us was the ability to let a Broker have a site that could then spawn agent sites. By doing it that way, Brokers could “offer” their agents more than a single agent profile page. So it just made logical sense to set up the solution as a multisite solution. We could deploy custom plugins once (and update them once) and make sure our WordPress installation was current in a single click.

Solving Search – Because the native search sucks

If you’ve used WordPress before, you know the search isn’t great. And while there are solutions out there, in the form of plugins, etc, the issue in Real Estate is that people want more than just linked lists. They don’t want to only see 3 bedroom homes. They want to see 3 bedroom homes under $400,000 that have more than 2 bathrooms and are in the neighborhoods they care about. That means the search needs help. So we solved it by stepping around WordPress completely. Instead, we create our own indexed table of meta-data and hit that for all searches. Then, we just send the post IDs back to WordPress so that it can display the posts correctly.

One Single Theme for Everything

Probably the most interesting aspect of this solution – which supports brokers like the one we have in Toronto with 140 agent sites attached to it – comes from the internal maintenance aspect of only having one theme that does everything for us. I know some WordPress gurus would suggest a series of child themes that clients could pick, but we haven’t found the need to have that kind of complexity. Instead, we did something different. While we know that StudioPress is well liked in the real estate world, we went a different approach and used stuff from the guys at WooThemes.

We’re WooFans

Let’s start by saying that the WooFramework (even if it’s neglected some in the Real Estate space) is awesome. It’s not only well written but it’s feature rich. It isn’t just clean code. It’s packed with tons of features – which they’ve recently pulled out and made available to a lot of different sites/themes. We had the same idea, about 8 months ago, and did something like it, without their direct knowledge or support. The bottom line was that they created features that some could argue are more plugin-like than theme-oriented. But we needed those features and we didn’t want to support tons of additional plugins (and deal with code conflicts). The guys at Woothemes also make sure that their features never conflict with each other (from a naming, or code libraries perspective).

So we just pulled features and code from various themes (none of them their own Real Estate theme). We loaded it up into a single, fancy, and rich control panel, and then taught our staff how to use it to create a variety of looks. The results were awesome. Here are 4 quick sample looks (some will look really familiar) that are all driven by the same theme.

Sure, some will look similar to each other, but that’s just because we were modeling them after existing themes we found online. We can also do more than simple sliders, and drop forms into them, like on this site.

The best part of it, as I mentioned before, is that the staff can create all these different looks by using a single back end control interface.

That’s our Story, and we’re Sticking to it

141 sites as part of a single multisite. 141 sites that all use the same theme, but look different. 141 sites that can be upgraded and updated with a single click. 141 sites that can be managed by folks that don’t have to be code gurus. It’s not the standard real estate approach using WordPress, but it works for us, and most importantly, it works for our customers.

Not all innovation requires that you start from scratch. I don’t know if that’s rule number one for me, but it’s in my top ten. Right there with it is something like, design with what you have rather than waiting until your fundraising is complete. Whatever you think about my rules for product launches, start ups, minimal viable products, minimal viable audiences, and more -  there are a handful of tools and strategies that regularly work for me. One of them is WordPress. Now, not every start up that I coach uses WordPress, so it’s not a hard and fast rule…but many do – mostly because it makes innovation a lot easier and faster.

“I Need to Raise $1MM bucks…”

When I first met the ROAR team it was in the form of their CEO, Matt McKee, who was already working on building a mobile solution for non-profits. He was already doing all the right things – evaluating his market without the expense or delay of building a new product from scratch. Like most people, he’d talked to a few developers and engineering companies and heard the same refrain you may have heard, “Sure we can build it. We can build anything…” but the price tag that regularly came with it was high. So in one of our early conversations he shared the need to raise a lot of money to build his platform.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with raising a lot of money to spur on innovation. But raising money too early can just as easily kill you. So I regularly suggest that you innovate where you are, rather than waiting for a large chunk of change to drive your new product development efforts. Additionally, as we all know, things get cheaper as time moves on…

“They quoted me $120,000″

After about six months of online meetings and phone calls with the guys from ROAR, Matt called up to tell me that he’d received a new quote for the platform and it was way down from the last one he got. Mind you, the platform definition hadn’t changed. At it’s heart, ROAR wanted to let churches, schools, and other non-profits access a platform to collect and create content and then push it to a customized mobile app for either iPhones or Android phones. While the lower price was great, the challenge was that the quotes Matt was getting still assumed that every aspect of the platform required it’s own innovation – a custom CMS, a custom code generator, a custom build engine and finally, custom mobile apps.

What if we used WordPress & Appcelerator?

“What if we could do it cheaper?” is rarely a question a CEO gets, so Matt was all ears when we first started talking about how to build a v.1 platform on the cheap. Now don’t get me wrong, others have said it and I agree with them 100% – if you’re not embarrassed by your v.1 then you waited too long to ship. I wasn’t suggesting that he could build a million dollar platform for twenty thousand dollars. But I was suggesting that the right tools could drive his innovation forward without the need to raise tons of outside money. After all, I love bootstrapping.

Creating a Custom CMS with WordPress

WordPress would provide the custom CMS – with the use of plugins like Gravity Forms, Advanced Custom Fields, and a host of others from WPMU Dev. It would enable the team to create a baseline site with forms, custom fields and custom post types, and then for each new sign up, replicate the template but customize it per client. The New Blog Template plugin worked perfectly. We even customized the dashboard with another plugin. But that was only one part of three.

The Glue

The second part came in the form of a custom plugin developed to pull data out of WordPress and make it available for part three. While part one, the custom CMS using WordPress, took know-how, the innovation was one of assembly rather than creation. You just had to know that it was possible and you had to bring the right features together to make it happen. But it was fast (weeks, not months). Part two was brand-new, creation-style innovation. It was a custom plugin of our own making that opened the door to part three. It pulled data out of WordPress and made it available to Titanium.

Appcelerator – why take any other approach?

When it came to the mobile side of things, the team from Appcelerator had done all the needed innovation, so the big question was why wouldn’t we use it? ROAR’s VP of Development (formerly the CEO of Mobile Salt), did all the heavy lifting – creating the Titanium code that would result in both iPhone and Android applications that could be compiled on their own platforms and sent in to the stores. But he needed the data from WordPress (which is why this was a three part solution instead of a two part one). Once he was able to access it programmatically, he had custom apps rolling out in no time.

Lessons Learned

Did everything work out perfectly? No. Appcelerator rolled out a new version right before launch. Re-coding part of your code that you thought was done is never an exciting proposition. One of the early plugins we used for a ticket system started sucking almost immediately. So that had to be pulled. And customizing the WordPress Admin Theme – via theme and plugin – required a few rounds to make sure that we were respective roles (in terms of what parts of the dashboard we were hiding). But the cost was a fraction of even the cheaper quote ROAR had received. And it let them launch their own CMS and sign up a few hundred customers in a remarkably short time.

Innovation doesn’t have to start from scratch. It may not be rule one, but it’s in the top ten. When others are innovating – like the entire WordPress community and the folks at Appcelerator – you can accelerate your own initiatives by leveraging their work and building from there. Often, it can result in you jammin a lot of cash back in your pockets!

The Simplest Approach - No “Members”

Editing the Visibility setting on a Page

The first approach is almost cheating, but it’s so easy you can’t ignore it. Imagine you have a product you want to offer clients (be it a downloadable PDF, a set of three videos, or some other special content). In this case, one of the simplest approaches (assuming you’re using WordPress) is to first  create a Page (http://bit.ly/A5Hq7D) and then protect it. Protecting it with a password is really easy.

You click on the visibility “edit” in the Publish metabox and you’ll see these options (see the image on the right). Select “password protected” and you’re good to go. Just enter a password.

Now, when someone buys your product, reply to them via email with a URL and the password and they’re ready to enter your protected page without every needing a full-blown membership site.

Need to protect more than one page? Here’s a Free Option.

Sometimes you have more content than just a single page can hold. In that case, you may need something more sophisticated than just a password-protected page. So in that case, I suggest you check out the Members plugin by Justin Tadlock (you can download it here).

As you can see here, once it’s installed you can assign which roles have access to any post or page you author in your WordPress site. It really is pretty easy. Assign some registered users to a group, and then give them access to the content they need (or have paid for).

Did I mention this plugin is free? That’s nice, isn’t it?

Control Permissions by Role

The Complete Solution – Still Pretty Easy

Now, if you need much more than that, then there’s really only one way to go, and that’s to jump over to Wishlist and get their membership product.

But wait, you might be thinking, how do I know if it does what I want it to do. Well I don’t know what you want it to do, but I can still tell you it does it. Crazy huh? That’s because they have a great install base (which means they have the revenue coming in to keep a solid support staff in place), they have great developers, and the product is solid. So it’s likely that whatever you want to do has been done before by one of the 34 thousand sites that they power.

Take a quick look at this tab bar for the Wishlist plugin, once you’re on the Admin site of your site.

Powerful options with Wishlist

But don’t take my word, check out this video that walks you through their plugin and how it works.

But wait, there’s still one more thing to figure out – Video

One of the most important aspects of the membership sites I get involved with is the need to present video on the site that others can’t get to in other ways. In other words, people don’t want to upload videos to YouTube, and then charge people to see them inside of a membership site because once they see the video on YouTube, they’ll just head over there and watch them for free.

Good news! Vimeo is here to solve all your needs and wants – but it does require that you purchase their Plus package.

The screen below should highlight how easy it is – by letting you constrain which urls will allow embedded videos (i.e. your membership site). It also lets you make sure that your videos aren’t present on vimeo.com. It doesn’t get easier than that.

The options make it easy to protect your content.

No one wants a slow site

The challenge is knowing how many plugins to use – especially when you read reports like these about the performance of some of these plugins. Who wants a slow site? Not me and not you. So you temper the desire to use a plugin with the need to make sure you site loads quickly.

Tough Trade-offs

But that still leaves you with decisions. What should you code directly? What should you do with a plugin? What should you just skip for now? And when, if ever, should you pay for a plugin. These are the tough decisions that every developer/designer has to make – often with clients that are asking for more and more features. So how do you decide?

Well there are four strategies I recommend in the presentation I gave to a few WordPress meetups.

One Simple Approach

But there’s also one I didn’t state in that deck. And it’s really simple. It goes like this:

Rather than testing out every possible plugin option for each of the features you want on a site, why not meet with or get to know someone who has already done that. When they do it, ask them to write it up and give it to you for free.

If they say yes, you’re golden. So hey, click here to get the gold.

In the Old Days

If you were trying to create a mobile site a couple years ago, you’d be looking for a great mobile WordPress plugin, like WPtouch. Now, to be clear, there was nothing wrong with that plugin – and there still isn’t. It comes with a great set of features and a lot of control over what shows up when you’re looking at your WordPress site on a mobile device. But there were some challenges as well – like you knew the site was a shadow of it’s real self, and that most of your styling disappeared.

These days it’s all about being Responsive

So the word “responsive” simply means that your WordPress site is coded in a way that reacts (hence the term) to the different sizes the browser may find itself in. If you think about it, there are at least four sizes you care about – on a large monitor, on a tablet, on a mobile device in landscape form, and on a mobile device in portrait. So if your site can adjust to those four sizes, then you could call it “responsive.” Now, that’s not the technical definition, but for the non-tech audience, and in terms of objectives, it’s good enough.

So how do you do it?

The easiest way is to pick a theme that already does it for you. I know. Not rocket science. If you’re a programmer, there are great resources out there to help you – like this free skeleton theme, or tutorials and articles over here. But let’s imagine you’re not a programmer (because most of you aren’t). Then you visit a site like WooThemes (to look for some of their newer sites) or visit ThemeForest and search for “responsive” while in their WordPress category.

That’s how it’s done. Once you pick a theme, you’ll be nearly done. You may have to adjust some of your widgets, but if you’ve been using features like WordPress’ featured images for your posts, they should automatically use new CSS media queries and adjust your text automatically, and you’ll have a mobile site without a plugin.

Want some Inspiration?

Check out this list of 60 different responsive sites to get you excited about upgrading your own site. Tell me which one you like best.

5. They are a pretty solid domain registrar.

I’m sure you can find cheaper registrars for  your domain names but when I was paying $15 or $20 per domain, they showed up and were charging me half that. So I love their domain registration.

4. They let me transfer domains to other GoDaddy folks quickly.

If you’ve ever had to transfer a domain to someone else, you know it can be a pain. But when you transfer a domain to another GoDaddy account, it’s not really a “transfer”. Instead you’re just changing account owners and they do that spectacularly well. It’s so easy to move 20 domains over to a friend or company that is ready to manage them.

3. The GoDaddy Blog is great!

Now, I don’t really mean the GoDaddy blog (not sure there is one), but I mean the blog of the owner – Bob Parsons. His site - http://www.bobparsons.me/ – is fun, opinionated, and engaging. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. My only complaint is that it doesn’t look like it’s a WordPress site…but hey, you can’t win em all.

2. Have you seen their SuperBowl ads?

Come on, seriously? When you first saw that superbowl ad, did you have any idea what they did? But who cared? People were talking about them and were finding them online. Now I’m not suggesting you follow their lead in ad creation but I will say, they were one of the first to only put part of a commercial on television and the rest online. That sense of hybrid marketing was an innovative model to drive site engagement.

1. The GoDaddy Girls

While initially it was all about the sexy models, there’s a girl power thing going on when you get Danica Patrick to sell for you. Oh, and yeah, they look cute too. So girl power plus cute is a winning combo – duh!

What I left out…

Now, so we’re clear…what I left out was WordPress hosting. I don’t like them for that. So if you’re looking for a hosting provider, check out Page.ly or search for “managed WordPress hosting” to find a great set of hosting options. Like I said, GoDaddy isn’t all bad.

If you’re like me, then you have felt the pain and frustration of adding a plugin to your WordPress site, only to see the whole site break, fall apart, or turn into a white screen. And if you’re not technical, it can feel like it’s game over. You’ll read online that you should test each plugin separately and that will have you scratching your head. What does that mean? How? How will I know if there’s conflict? So instead of solving the issue, let’s look at preventing it – by looking at ways to head it off at the pass.

Four Strategies for Plugin Selection

It will be no surprise to you that the best approach to solving the challenge of finding the right plugins for your WordPress site is to leverage the community around you. After all, the beautiful thing about WordPress and open source as a whole is that the collective wisdom is continually developing and it’s all available to you at any point. So how can you leverage this community? Here are four strategies.

Trusted Peers

If you browse the entire list of plugins that are available online (like at WordPress or CodeCanyon), you’ll discover that the one way to know for sure what NOT to download is to look at the accompanying data related to the plugins. What kind of data? Look at things like the number of downloads, the rating, comments, and in the case of Code Canyon – the number of purchases. All of this tells you whether a plugin is getting traction or not. Another important thing to look at is the creation date or last updated date. If the code was created (or last updated) more than a year ago, it may not be something you want to pull down.

Trusted Recommendation

Another resource to consider when looking at plugins is recommendations by well-known WordPress folks in the community. Joost de Valk is a great resource who is writing some reviews on plugins and themes. But he’s not the only one out there. There are many folks out there that provide tips and resources as they review themes and plugins. As you get to know them (Lester Chan, Andrea Rennick, Justin Tadlock, Brian Gardner, and the list goes on and on), you’ll discover their expertise and the places where they can provide valuable insight.

Trusted Authors or Vendors

Much like trusted reviews, the power of knowing who to trust is huge. Folks like those listed above – Lester Chan, Andrea Rennick, Justin Tadlock, Joost de Valk – all offer pluggins (some of them more than one) and once you know you can trust them, you can grab most of what they’re cooking. These aren’t celebrities. Instead, they’re contributors – people who have worked hard to offer value to the community. You can’t really make tons of money selling plugins, so they don’t do it for the riches and fame. They do it because they can, because they had a problem and they wanted it solved, and maybe because they’d solved it so many times already that it make sense to turn it into a plugin. Find the people who are adding consistent value and follow them. Then look at their plugins. They’re likely to be good ones.

Trusted Marketplace

The last approach is a little trickier because the wealth of trusted marketplaces isn’t yet really developed. Code Canyon is offering a marketplace but I’m not yet sure what they’re doing to manage quality and the metrics are harder to gather and leverage than what you see on the WordPress.org site. One marketplace that I do like, though it’s not free, is the one by the guys from WPMU Dev. It’s pricey. So what I recommend is waiting until you find deals for a year’s membership at 80% off. These deals come and go every now and then and you can find them at appsumo.com, so keep an eye out there – hint, that link above is live now…check it out. Once you pay to get into their marketplace, all the plugins are available to you to download while your membership is active.

What’s your approach?

So that’s my take – four ways to help you find the right plugins. You’re probably wondering which ones I recommend, right? Well, I’ll be publishing an eBook (because the old one was hopelessly outdated) this month that you can get for free, so keep an eye out.

Do you have a different approach? What is it?